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).
Well, the dungeon is special in a few ways. Its a HIGHLY constrained environment, and most of the common likely situations have pre-existing rules structure (dealing with traps, climbing, ropes, secret doors, slopes, supplies, time, doors, surprise, tracking, etc.). There are genre tropes (deeper = more dangerous) etc. which also factor in. It is, of course, possible for a situation in a dungeon to be entirely up to the GM to decide what would happen, but USUALLY (certainly at low levels) the possibilities are close to a closed set.
In the wilderness none of this is so true. There are rules and conventions, but the possible options for the players, the things they can attempt to do, the situations which can be generated, is MUCH larger, and much more likely to produce these situations where the GM is forced to make up something 'rule like' (a ruling). This can lead to a breakdown in player agency WRT what the characters can do.
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.
The point I'm making is this is far afield from the initial paradigm. The GM is not just running a game, and using existing rules. The game is now basically a creature of the GM. Most GMs express this as a great difficulty in being able to place significant challenges in front of the PCs which the players cannot simply find an end run around. I know how this is, being VERY good at torpedoing GM plans and defeating the most crazy threats with unanticipateable means at high levels.
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).
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.
Yeah, it is, which is in fact part of the illustration of what happened with classic D&D when it tried to do 'story', and continues to happen when you do story with a system that isn't equipped for it. If you know the right techniques you can do story, but a largely linear flow AP-type setup won't cut it. TSR was out of its depth here.
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.
Heh, yeah, I was at that tournement
So, yes, the A series is quite linear, and TSR didn't understand how to make a story work in D&D (never did figure it out even 15 years later). They were still TRYING. The re-use of the tournament material was another issue, which didn't help.
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.
DL to me was pretty much uninteresting. I was doing a better job of it already by that point. Again, illustrates how classic D&D's structure fails to work as a story game.
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.
Sure, even 4e has them (Tomb of Annihilation for instance, but even H1 is mostly a dungeon). I mean it was the death of the dungeon maze in a paradigmatic sense. That was no longer the model for all adventures.
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.
Right, because, if you are going to A) have a story, and B) use a module, which necessitates a fixed number of set encounter locations, then you're pretty much stuck doing this. Nobody has really made headway in this, the APs for PF are pretty linear too! Actually they're BETTER, but only to the extent that they do what you did, add more paths such that encounters can happen in different orders. It helps, but it doesn't really make it a story centered game.
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"!
3e said that, but it means it about as much as 2e means what it says. My interpretation of 'Back to the Dungeon!' is "story gaming doesn't work, we can't do it, so lets just do what works, dungeon crawls!".
HOWEVER 3e in fact has much of what is needed to do story gaming. It has strong character build systems, which allow the player to express through classes, race, PrC, skill choices, and feats, what he wants his character to be 'about' (and character backstory is of course available to fill in). It has a workable, if clunky, skill system that can handle checks to 'see what happens'. All it really lacks is GM and player advice on doing Story Now, but even 4e doesn't quite have that...
So, 3e can be seen as an advance, but it was kind of stillborn. Also, because d20 is open, it was easy to create variants of 3.x that actually do story now. There's no reason to play with the core rules and do it.
Would that be Story Some Other Time?
hehe.
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.
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?
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.
Well, I think that 'D&D' in a more abstract sense continues. For now 5e is alive and well, but since it basically reneged on all of 4e's cosmological and lore evolutions, that aspect is kind of 'dead', its really a statement of 'things should remain the same, GW is the last word.' In terms of styles of play and other similar evolutions, again, 5e squarely rejects 4e's Story Game orientation, so where can you go from there?
5e will, IMHO slowly become irrelevant. Maybe in 10-15 years when its largely left behind WotC/Hasbro will simply go on, a new set of designers will come and some new experiment will happen. I don't think D&D will be a major RPG at that point, though some completely new version might 'rise again'.
Meanwhile other 'D&Ds' will do the innovating. I guess this vindicates the vision that produced the OGL in the first place. New games will sprout from D&D's fertile soil to re-imagine it in the form of Story Game, of this that or the other thing we don't even have a name for today.
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.
Yes, and in this Story Now kind of thing it isn't that useful to classify the activities. I don't need to have characters 'balanced' between activities or have some of each pillar in my game, or any other such things. I need to have activities reflect story considerations. Only the dramatic characteristics and actual narratives of the activities, and how that feeds back into driving the story matters. Notice how Story Games MOSTLY have a pretty generic type of mechanics too, even 4e is very much this way, because there's not really a value in distinguishing activities mechanically. Even 5e falls into this category pretty much.
I guess the only sense in which it might be worthwhile to think of classification of activities is in the sense of evaluating the mechanics of a game to see if all the envisaged character activities are covered adequately. So in HoML I'd think about if there's a 'boon' that produces 'guy who is good at tracking' (which a player who wants to track down someone might add to his character to express that).
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.
Not really, maybe nobody is interested in anything that you would classify as 'social interaction', so why would I need to have that occur or make room for it? More to the point, these classes of activities are so broad and general that OF COURSE some of each is likely to happen in any game, and probably fairly often. I don't need to 'provide' those opportunities, they will arise if needed.
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
hehe. Well, anyway, I think I'm doing exploration the justice it NEEDS, its an activity which provides framing for drama. I guess I would say that we can play it out in as much detail as we want. I think that the better way to think of a Story Now version of a dungeon exploration game would be to call the exploration the 'central theme' of that game. Thus 'crawling the dungeon' becomes the agenda, or at least the genre/milieu in which all else is cast. You would then be able to play out the drama I outlined above, and play through the details of exploration. How the characters handled the tension would then be a relevant thing. There might even be mechanics for that...
