D&D General The longer I play Baldur's Gate 3 ...

[Zardnaar]

Late 1E into 2E.

Tracy Hickman might possibly only have been delivering what the market had already been calling for, but I still feel like the Hickman Revolution was the biggest turning point in the development of RPG culture since its inception. For the worse.

The idea of what an "adventure" is supposed to be seems to me completely contradictory and opposed to what's the whole reason of the existence of RPG. And because these adventures are the only kind of mainstream game content you can get, everyone making new game content keeps trying to emulate that format.
And it's a bad format. After 40 years it should have become obvious that it doesn't work, but still the whole industry is trying to make it work.
And for countless GMs, these adventures are the only kind of reference they have for how scenes in a campaign should look like.

The great tragedy of RPGs.

I'm fine with those types of modules existing but they became the default for a decade or so.

And none of them are remembered fondly unless I6 counts.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I have a question: WHAT DID THEY DO? Because, as far as I can tell, D&D beyond is only minorly changed since they bought it. "Maps", for one, obviously. What else? The encounter builder is still in Beta and the Character Builder still can't do some stuff from Tasha's, if I remember rightly.

Yeah, still no sidekick classes from Tasha's. Classes are supposed to be hard to code -- which seems like a core issue that maybe programmers need to address -- but it's been a long, long time.

But there's other content missing, too, like all of the monsters and the Dankwood Goblin race from the Muk charity books.

It is a puzzle what they're all doing with their time.

I really hope that there's a big UI change-up coming for D&D Beyond that's just waiting for the 2024 Core Books to drop!

That's the only rational explanation I can see, assuming they're fully employed and they didn't just hire a bunch of idiot nephews of Hasbro executives whom they don't expect to produce work product.

EDIT: And still no way to buy Book of Many Things content piecemeal, which makes me think that it probably is deliberate.

 

[Demetrios1453]

I mean the Drangonlance adventures were just scripted re-tellings of the novels IIRC. It was the novel in a different format. PCs didn't really get a choice of what happened to their characters, because they were playing the characters from the novels.

Well, in some cases. The novels sometimes purposely skipped whole sections of the plot so as not to spoil the modules. For example, the whole section at Icewall and gaining the dragon orb which makes up DL6 is completely skipped over in the novels. This group of the companions goes from escaping Tarsis to being on a boat being pursued by a white dragon, and the novel just states they had a really exciting adventure in the meantime without going into what happened at all! This was all very irritating for young teenage me who didn't realize they were novelizations from pre-existing material - I wanted to read what happened in the interim! This is not the only example, as there are other similar situations - DL4, DL9, and DL11 receive similar treatment, as are parts of the other modules.

 

[Yora]

It is a puzzle what they're all doing with their time.

Same thing software developers at WotC have always been doing, presumably.

 

[Shardstone]

Demiplane, which is ran by the dude who ran the DND Beyond project for years, has proven that all the claims that classes are still hard to code as silly. Demiplane has PF2E on there which adds hella new classes and archetypes all the time, and they have a lot of remastered content on there. With 150 people working on D&D Beyond, there is absolutely no excuse for them not having better class tools, tools for all the first party stuff, and better homebrew tools.

 

[Rystefn]

I mean the Drangonlance adventures were just scripted re-tellings of the novels IIRC. It was the novel in a different format. PCs didn't really get a choice of what happened to their characters, because they were playing the characters from the novels.

Backwards. I'm not sure how this has managed to dig so deeply into the zeitgeist of the hobby, but it's utterly wrong. The reality is completely the other way around. The Dragonlance original trilogy is a novelization of the modules. Those characters were the pregens that was included standard in a great modules at the time, but you really only see now in starter sets, and were adapted into the novels with the characterizations given to them by the playtest group. Raistlin's whole deal with seeing the inevitable decay of things was given to him literally only because the module artist decided to draw him with hourglass pupils, and is the exact quote by the artist as relayed to me by Hickman, "because I thought it looked cool."

The modules came first. You can absolutely play them just like any other modules without just playing them as if you're re-living the novels. they are not remotely as hard-coded as people claim (though they are a lot more railroady than I like for sure). You do not have to use the pre-made characters at all.

 

[Incenjucar]

Programming classes is time-consuming and tedious, but the "hard" part is dealing with ambiguous rules.

 

[Malmuria]

Backwards. I'm not sure how this has managed to dig so deeply into the zeitgeist of the hobby, but it's utterly wrong. The reality is completely the other way around. The Dragonlance original trilogy is a novelization of the modules. Those characters were the pregens that was included standard in a great modules at the time, but you really only see now in starter sets, and were adapted into the novels with the characterizations given to them by the playtest group. Raistlin's whole deal with seeing the inevitable decay of things was given to him literally only because the module artist decided to draw him with hourglass pupils, and is the exact quote by the artist as relayed to me by Hickman, "because I thought it looked cool."

The modules came first. You can absolutely play them just like any other modules without just playing them as if you're re-living the novels. they are not remotely as hard-coded as people claim (though they are a lot more railroady than I like for sure). You do not have to use the pre-made characters at all.

I know the modules came first, but I strong disagree that they were not railroads, especially when sat beside classic adventures modules. It's called the Hickman revolution for a reason--they were the start of something very new in adventure design, and to my mind the inception of what eventually would be come "adventure paths."

How Dragonlance Ruined Everything

How's that for hyperbole? And it is hyperbole. Dragonlance didn't ruin everything , but it did exert a baleful influence over the developme...

grognardia.blogspot.com

Dragonlance – Vintage RPG

www.vintagerpg.com

 

[Micah Sweet]

I know the modules came first, but I strong disagree that they were not railroads, especially when sat beside classic adventures modules. It's called the Hickman revolution for a reason--they were the start of something very new in adventure design, and to my mind the inception of what eventually would be come "adventure paths."

How Dragonlance Ruined Everything

How's that for hyperbole? And it is hyperbole. Dragonlance didn't ruin everything , but it did exert a baleful influence over the developme...

grognardia.blogspot.com

Dragonlance – Vintage RPG

www.vintagerpg.com

Um, they said in the post you responded to that the modules were railroady, just not hard-coded.

 

[Rystefn]

I know the modules came first, but I strong disagree that they were not railroads, especially when sat beside classic adventures modules. It's called the Hickman revolution for a reason--they were the start of something very new in adventure design, and to my mind the inception of what eventually would be come "adventure paths."

How Dragonlance Ruined Everything

How's that for hyperbole? And it is hyperbole. Dragonlance didn't ruin everything , but it did exert a baleful influence over the developme...

grognardia.blogspot.com

Dragonlance – Vintage RPG

www.vintagerpg.com

1) If you know the modules came first, why did you claim that they're scripted retellings of the novels? That's literally only possible if the novels came first.
2) I never said they weren't railroads. In fact, I explicitly said they were MORE railroady than I like.
3) Posting lines to people crying about the modules on the internet isn't any kind of evidence against anything I said, it's only evidence for the thing I said about things getting into the zeitgeist.

Further, I'm just going to point at Grognardia claiming the DragonLance trilogy changed the face of mainstream fantasy literature and laugh my ass off. I could go though and break down article, pointing out where it's wrong (like claiming that Sturm is scripted to die when the modules say that Kitiara will avoid killing the Heroes if possible) and where opinions are wildly overstated, even considering the admission of it being hyperbolic... but I don't need to. I'm just going to point back to that one claim and start laughing again.