NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Stormonu" data-source="post: 5581883" data-attributes="member: 52734">There has certainly been a shift in modulecraft over the years.  Remembering back through old modules, the early years of D&D certainly concentrated on "here's a location - how do YOU best it".  The adventure was about the location, and any story that arose was incidental.  Characters were simply avatars for the players to interact through to deal with the location.  This was the age of "your character knows what YOU know".By the time of Ravenloft (though it still had a strong "Location is King" element) and the Dragonlance series, that had clearly changed.  Story was becoming more and more important and it was becoming more and more popular to tell a story that involved these fictional characters.  Beating a location became less and less important as the fictional characters themselves became more important (think of the likes of Raistlin and & Co., the perennial villian Strahd, as well as the rise of Drizzt).  As 1E grew to 2E, the game was slowly drawing a line between what the character and the player knew, and the game was shifting more towards the fictional story being more important than the location where the adventure was occuring - a shift away from "Dungeon Crawls".I think that the likes of White Wolf games stole a lot of former D&D players (as well as many who would never touch D&D) because they hit on what D&D did poorly at the time - characterization.  WW was based more on storytelling aspects and D&D was lagging behind.  It was only when we started seeing the likes of Planescape (with Dark Sun being perhaps a preview of the drift away from "Location is King") that D&D itself started diving into immersion, and even then it was hampered by the rules/mechanics it was based off.  It was still a game of "kill things and take their stuff" even as the designers tried to deny it.3E drew a firm line between character knowledge and player knowledge, while at the same time shifting back toward "Location is King".  However, it allowed for nearly equal play either way - you could do games where Story was more important, and the play of the game could be resolved like a story or novel, or you could go old sckool with the 10' pole and checking for traps every 10 feet and brave the likes of the Tomb.My brief brush with 4E gives me the blush that while it too can handle play in either direction, it cares less about Story than the action/location at hand.  There is a heavy stress on the fictional character, but it less on exploring who the character is and more on what he/she can do.  IMO, characters are very much a tool to interact with the environment, and not so much a fictional individual to explore what it means to be in the fictional world.In the end, RPGs have moved far, far away from the outlook way back in the days the Tomb came out.  Tomb was asking a question - "Are you, the PLAYER, smart enough to get through this alive?".  Most modules these day ask an entirely different question - "Do you want to hear a story?"</blockquote>

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