'classic' D&D (by which I mean essentially TSR D&D) follows an arc of development. The earliest conception of the game is of a vast dungeon, filled with treasure and monsters, which the PCs explore systematically. It may, or may not in some cases, be associated with a 'town' where the PCs can recruit henchmen, heal, buy and sell things, etc.
The next stage of evolution was to include a 'wilderness' which follows a similar formula (entirely generated by the GM and discovered by the players through action resolution, with its characteristics, the facts of the game world, acting as constrains). This wilderness exploration stage starts to break down the paradigm, because the dungeon puts hard constraints on things, you can only travel by the prescribed routes, etc. but the wilderness has far fewer such constraints.
I disagree that it breaks down the paradigm. It just means the DM has to be better at either preparing her world-setting or making it up on the fly (or both at once).
Finally high level play created even greater issues by further breaking down the constraints and thus making it hard for the GM to anticipate the course of action. It also involved things like 'freeholds' and such, which are MUCH more abstract and rely on highly subjective GM judgments.
Having it be hard for the GM to anticipate what happens next is just fine. Again, it simply points to her having to be well-versed in her setting and - as I often put it - ready willing and able to hit the curveballs thrown her way by the players.
As players demanded more dramatic elements in play the game evolved in conception ultimately to 2nd Edition AD&D where the game EXPLICITLY states that the objective is to create interesting stories involving the PC's heroic exploits.
Yeah, 2e swung this pendulum too far the other way; though I'm not entirely sure whether the impetus came from below (player demand) or above (designer preference).
On the contrary, from the publication of the module A1, which was, IMHO, the first 'story based' adventure to be published (someone will probably find antecedents, but it isn't that important)
It was in many ways also the first hard-core railroad series (or proto-AP) to be published, and has been rightly condemned for that over time...though nowhere near as hard-core a railroad as DL, which came a few years later.
the game left the original paradigm behind in the sense that the narrative was now ABOUT the characters and their dramatic needs and evolution. It was CERTAINLY far less constrained than previous play.
No...and no. Sorry.
Remember what the A-series was to begin with - a series of tournament modules. Those modules weren't really intended to tell a character-arc story at all, just for one to lead to the next enough that as players advanced to the next level of the tournament they could keep the same characters and with a minimum of exposition pick up the story as they'd already played through it. And if anything the A-series in campaign use is more constraining to play than less, as the players/PCs have to follow the trail...and have no choice whatsoever at the A3-A4 jump.
Dragonlance is the series that started the whole story-first business; and people IME either loved it or despised it. This one was all about character development through a story arc...though unless you inserted your own characters into the books' story somehow you were developing pre-gen characters someone else had designed. But, extremely constraining in play.
So, I would say that A1 marks the 'death of the dungeon maze' as the principle paradigm. I can attest, again by having been there, that this was a conclusion drawn AT THE TIME by both players and reviewers of this module and its successors.
Perhaps, but I don't think it was the death of the dungeon maze. It offered - in a still-dungeon-mazy sort of way - an alternative; which DL fully fleshed out later. Dungeon-based adventures still kept on coming, even into 3e.
A2 in fact is extremely linear in its design - particularly the upper level - when you look at it closely; it's designed to funnel the party into each encounter in a specific order no matter what they do, other than there's one branch they can take that dead-ends. When I ran it I stuck some extra doors and connections in there to make it a bit less predictable for me as DM and provide a few more choice points for the players/PCs.
While I agree that play methods have NOT in a lot of cases evolved too much, I will address how this is in tension with actual play practice below.
Yes, and these factors are in tension with, and undermine, exactly what you contend is 'easy'. In fact it isn't easy at all! 2e D&D is so infamously incoherent in the alignment of its declared narrative agenda and its GM-centered and often procedural mechanics that it hardly even bears comment! The only way to achieve the sort of narrative story arcs imagined is Illusionism and GM force, and the stories themselves must largely stem from the GM's imagination.
Exactly.
If you read 2e's "declared narrative agenda" to mean that it wants to give the DM a better avenue to in effect narrate her story and run the players/PCs through it (in other words, Dragonlance without the intervening novels breaking up the played-at-the-table story), then it suits itself very well. If you want to read more things into the idea of a narrative agenda, such as player control over the fiction or play-to-find-out virtual-world-design sorts of things, then no; you won't find them, because they aren't there.
2e as launched pretty much invites the DM to run a railroad game. Later came the pushback of players seeking more control, leading to the various splatbooks which - while still not getting them off the train - gave them much more by way of mechanical options for their PCs.
That's where 3e with its "Back to the dungeon" mantra really took root: it by extension meant "Get off the train"!
... a negative-image of Story Now.
Would that be Story Some Other Time?
Needless to say, I have little use for the maunderings of Mike Mearls. I think his idea of 'pillars of play' is unhelpful at the very least,
Where I think it's a rather brilliant boil-down of what's always been there: that there's other aspects to play than just combat, and here's what they are, explained.
and is at best an analysis of one facet of one specific technique of RPG play, which he seems to imagine is somehow all-encompassing.
The only aspect of play it doesn't encompass well is downtime, which I would add as a fourth pillar. Otherwise, what's it missing?
At the very least he seems to imagine that it is all he need ever address in terms of catering to his specific audience. This is part of the reason I have analyzed 5e as the 'tombstone' of D&D. It envisages no further horizon, and no ambition for any wider play experience, or any desire to explore beyond the boundaries of existing D&D lore, play techniques, rule formulations, etc.
I think you're being a bit pessimistic here. That said, sooner or later you'll inevitably get to ten and where do you go from there? These amps don't go to 11.
So, speaking for myself and not the OP, I don't even consider the whole question of 'pillars' to be interesting. I've reformulated by own flavor of 'D&D' upon an entirely different set of precepts. The idea of pillars and some sort of 'balance between them' is irrelevant within my conception. That doesn't make exploration an impossible agenda, it just puts it at the level of agenda, and not of a 'mechanical space' within the game's rules construct. Put it this way, I would say that if a player chooses to make character build choices and narrative choices which focus on abilities which relate to exploration, then Story Now concerns dictate that the GM in a HoML game would present exploratory challenges.
I don't see the pillars as mechanical constructs so much as I see them as focus points for play at the table.
Look at it this way: what is there that ever happens in play that isn't encompassed by one or more of:
Combat
Downtime
Exploration
Interaction (or Socializing, or whatever term goes towards the talky bits with other PCs and with NPCs)
The story grows out of the sum of what all these activities, repeated as necessary, lead to within the fiction.
But, note the sequence: activities first, story later - the story grows out of the activities; and even if the DM has a pre-authored story in mind these activities might send it in a totally different direction.
What you want to do is have the activities grow out of the story; the players set the story parameters via their beliefs and goals and then the activities become simply means to an end.
I would say that, dramatically, exploration is generally more an element of framing than it is a direct response to character development. In other words a character, dramatically, is unlikely to have an agenda that is purely 'explore for the sake of exploration'. If I was presented with a character which the player had drawn up like this, the first thing I would do is challenge them to explore the MOTIVE for exploration, because exploration is an ACTIVITY, not a belief or end goal.
Combat is an activity. Social interaction with others in the fiction is an activity. Downtime, or what you do during it, is an activity. None of these are beliefs or end goals, and that's the point: they're the things you do en route to achieving (or not) your end goals. Because of this, the game has to provide opportunities - and time! - for all of these to occur.
Lets imagine, a player might respond that he is a worshipper of Ioun, and holds exploration to be an element of devotion to his patron. So now the character's core belief has been refined to a dedication to Ioun, and that probably has some motivational story attached to it. The exploration element isn't being denied, it is described as an interest and avocation of the character. It just isn't what we would generally leverage. A story would take place WHILE exploring. The story might test the character's devotion to Ioun, maybe by making exploration a costly activity in some way (IE loss of lives, wealth expended, necessity to make morally fraught choices, etc.). So I can frame a scene as "while exploring XYZ, your brother-in-law falls in a pit and perishes, what about that?" (I'm extrapolating the outcome of the action here, as well as the initial framing). How does the character break the news to his sister? Does he consider this price to be worth the service to Ioun which it represents? Just how far will he go? Will he sacrifice 10 lives to cross the mountains? 20? 100? How will the folks back home treat that? Will he be able to return and face them?
You could frame that scene, but you'd be doing no justice to the actual activity of exploring...you know, the mappy searchy cautious tense stuff that takes time at the table. Then at some point there might be a pit trap into which the brother-in-law, having failed various game-mechanics to avoid it, falls and dies.
Now the exploration probably turns to a) finding a safe way out with the corpse, and-or then b) finding someone who can revive it. Failing that, the focus turns to the Interaction activity if he goes home and tells them the bad news...which might quickly lead to the Combat activity if they don't take it well!
Lanefan
