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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 5080894" data-attributes="member: 80487">That's what it's about when it's about that. I have never encountered any bitching about "evocative description" in the Dragonlance modules! It's the getting pushed around like hired hands in some director's production that irks folks who showed up expecting to play a game of AD&D.Theme and dramatic timing, though? Yeah, those sort of take a back seat to the extent that it's not the umpire's job to play the game for the players. But then, old-style D&D is not Professional Wrasslin'.If folks expect something more like the latter when they pay the price of admission, then you're golden.No kidding. I mean, they were about as "ideally designed to facilitate" that as Strat-O-Matic Football was, or Squad Leader, or Diplomacy. In the 1970s, we broke out a game to play a game. Want someone to tell you a story? Switch on Marlin Perkins or Rod Serling.D&D, T&T, etc., dovetailed naturally with the temperament that gets into, e.g., making up "fan fiction". That's probably a usual component of the inducement to do the work of a Game Master. The GM role, though -- like a lot in D&D -- originated in the war-game field. The scope of the early campaigns was more like Tony Bath's Hyboria than like the constrained affairs taken for granted these days.(I don't know when that started, but it sure seems tougher to manage a big campaign now I'm of a certain age. Maybe the change is a sign of the 'graying' of the hobby, or at least of the business?)Anyway, I see the successive sprouting of different branches of development:wargames+Braunstein --> RPGs --> story-telling games... with a roughly parallel but diverging (and perhaps re-converging) evolution in the field of computer games. The line there that goes back to D&D is now a much bigger phenomenon! It is probably less a case today, especially for a newer generation of gamers, of computer games riding on D&D's coat-tails than of vice-versa.Just 16 or 17 rooms per level seems remarkably cramped to me. Then again, you're talking about a convention scenario.</blockquote>

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