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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Marc17" data-source="post: 9825105" data-attributes="member: 7054182">Well, I came into gaming in 1980, and I can't remember a killer DM, but it certainly made sense at the time. I feel that any killer DM you ran into, either you didn't play with them again, or you told them you weren't having fun and they changed their way. The game was considered different back then where the game being played out was "see how much resources you can pull out of the dungeon without dying". One of the reasons for AD&D being created, IIrC, was to provide a common framework for convention tournaments at the time. Many of these tournament modules became D&D modules sold and thus influenced play. The novel mechanic being used that made the game different was "What does your character do, and how do they do it?" You can see that in the infamous frictionless room in White Plume Mountains module. The advice in the encounter was just to tell the DM that the goal was to get a rope attached to the two ends of the room and once that is done, the players didn't even have to make any rolls to pass the challenge. That sort of game play does lend itself to telling stories I would say. I would say I thought it was. I remember, at the age of the younger Stranger Things kids, trying to get the English teacher to let me basically novelize one of my D&D games for the given assignment because that was creating and telling a story.Still, one can only move the paradigm so much. Convincing the early D&D players they are telling a story is one thing. Trying to convince them to play using modern role playing expectations in doing so, especially before most of the vocabulary used to explain such was not a thing yet, would meet with much more opposition. Still, I had D&D games that did just that. One, we barely rolled any dice. The good games were always the ones where the story played out naturally. The DM even narrated combat and did so well enough even in our failure that we never demanded die rolls. I think my real advancement came with the Die Hard movie. I and my gaming friends got out of it and one said "I want to play in a RPG game like that, not as the guy going in and killing everybody, but the PCs are making their own objective like the robbers, plan it out, and then carry out the heist." I thought, that would be an interesting way to run a game. I tried it out and quickly found out that most players don't have that much initiative. I've stopped awarding individual awards for personal goals and actions just because, typically I find, one player acts to get those all the time, and most others just forget or don't care. You get into why players are playing and some want to tell the story, some want the story told to them, and some just want to roll dice to kill things and take their stuff.I'll also end with that I think that the Dragonlance stuff is just a bad attempt at storytelling, at least every time I encountered it. Everytime somebody wanted to run it, they seemed to be infatuated with the story, ran a railroad game from one of the modules, where if the players deviated from the expected plot, their actions would be dictated to them. All while the DM's SO or best friend decided to play a kinder character which was attempting to win the role of "most annoying and disruptive PC ever". I had some of the modules myself, and they looked beautiful, but I always had a hard time using them for anything except the given Dragonlance plot, unlike the other D&D modules which could be put into your own plots fairly easily.</blockquote>

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