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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 5663516" data-attributes="member: 1165">My position is a lot of the "differences" you're seeing here are cultural or generational. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if 2e adventures (or retro-clones) being written today bore little resemblance to the older ones. More time means more time to learn from previous mistakes.And I disagree. Other than the warforged, those races or equivalents existed in 2e. There were weird undead races in Ravenloft (or was that Requiem?), just like there's weird robot races in Eberron in 3.x. While some of the 4e core races (dragonborn) are weird, some have existed a long time (tieflings, I don't believe they were ever core previously). 4e even dropped a weird race - gnomes, seemingly a comedic cross between dwarves, halflings and elves - that only seem to have a reason to exist in Eberron. (Kudos to Keith Baker's Gnomes of Zilargo article for making gnomes cool again.)If you didn't want weird races affecting the story, you should have told your players they can only play PH1 or PH1-3 races. That would mean no vampires, no revenants, no warforged, and they wouldn't be affecting your story. Instead, you allowed anything. If you did that in 2e, you could have a party full of werescorpions -- as I saw in one of my first games -- or any of the weird races in Spelljammer (zikchil, rastipede, giff), Planescape (bariaur), Dark Sun (muls, thri-kreen, half-giants) and what have you.So in short, that's a game issue -- your decision to allow everything -- and has nothing to do with editions.Sure.There is only one solution to the problem. Your players have gone through the adventure already and so know it. What if they didn't? They could have missed a clue, failed a NWP/skill check, etc. And then they're stuck. That's bad adventure writing. Of course, saying that, this was before I knew that getting the swords was as big a part of the adventure as facing the bad guy. But I think, based on cultural evolution rather than rules, that it's still bad writing, and today's adventures, regardless of edition or even rule set, wouldn't be written that way.You could certainly make a mistake like that in 4e. "This character is a demi-god/demon prince/whatever. Only the Five Swords of Whatever can kill him. He's just immune to everything else." The rules don't stop it. New trends in adventure writing usually do.I think culture shapes them a lot more. But you keep going at the rules and not changes in the way people play. Maybe it's an age difference - I'm in my thirties, so old enough to have played 2e but not as set in my ways as an older player might be. I'm sure younger people who write and run 2e DnD adventures today will do so differently than your group does.I know there are "retro-clones" out there. I wonder if anyone has read any of their adventures, and can see if I'm onto something there.</blockquote>

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