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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 9371805">If that is your opinion, that is fair. But I would disagree. I think one of the things Ravenloft did so well was take  gothic and classic horror but fit it to the conceits and mechanics of of D&D. That is what made it so gameable for me and why I ran so many long term Ravenloft campaigns. I do like Masque of the Red Death (just got my POD version and haven't read it in ages so I am looking forward to exploring it again). And Masque of the Red Death was lots of fun, but I found it worked much better for one shots or short campaigns than long campaigns. Also it always ran into the problem of recruitment which was "why not just play CoC or Orrorsh (for TORG)". In terms of 2E specifically, this is obviously preference but I would suggest anyone who hasn't played 2E or hasn't played in a long time, try giving Ravenloft with the 2E mechanics a try (and to make a good faith effort at it). To give some backstory here, I cut my teeth on 2E Ravenoft, but like most gamers I knew, when 3E came out, I made the switch. And like a lot of gamers, I saw 2E and 1E as passe and clunky after that. However I noticed when I ran Ravenloft using the 3E materials, it  didn't feel the same. I assumed this was me being nostalgic for the 90s or being in a different headspace when I was young. But after getting frustrated with how railroady a lot of 3E felt and how focused it was on stuff like miniatures, EL/CR and system mastery, almost as a joke I picked up the 1E DMG again and started reading it. I realized there was actually a lot of solid advice in there (and I realized I had lost something along the way from when I started on 1E to that point). Again almost as a joke I suggested to my players that we run 2E Ravenoft. I expected the system to be ungainly and to suck compared to the new technology of 3E. I was wrong. The very first session, all that atmospehre flooded back to the table. And it wasn't nostalgia. I think what it was was the system was focused on very different things and it didn't have little inhibitors in it like Bluff and Diplomacy it forced the players to interact with NPCs more, to be more specific in their investiagionts, etc). But there was just something about the system that felt very different in play. Now I have only played 5E a handful of times, so I can't comment on that. I do think the human centric focus of old Ravenloft is certainly a better fit. But 2E wasn't human centric, they just made the world that way, so I think in any system it would be possible to restore that.</blockquote>

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