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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3231626" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree entirely. I said:My point was that, unless we are explicit about what those functions are that D&D has to fulfill - ie what is the principal player goal, for example, and how does this relate to character activities and character goals - we can't really say what counts as good or bad module design.And by player goal, I mean something more precise than "have fun". This is the goal of most amateur sport, and also of most amateur collecting, but sports magazines and collecting magazines read pretty differently.I think that D&D (in its 3E form) has as the principal player goal a type of tactical pleasure, in resource collection, management and deployment. The DMG rules for encounter design, XP, treasure awards and so on all support this goal. They also ensure that character goals overlap closely with player goals: the way players get resources to use and manage is by having their characters use their resources to kill monsters, thereby getting treasure.D&D doesn't tend to work as well when character goals are varied from the above. Oriental Adventures, for example, recognises that the sorts of characters it helps players build will not be interested primarily in amassing treasure by killing monsters, and tries to compensate by saying that the daimyo will award the characters with treasure instead. But this will tend to break the verisimilitude - if the daimyo has so much wealth, why does he need to send 4 3rd-level losers out to do his bidding, as opposed to buying a staff of solar summoning?I want to stress again that this is not a criticism of D&D; it is simply noting a system limitation. Other systems which try to overcome the limitation face different problems. HARP, for example, seems to assume much the same player goal as D&D, but has a goal-based XP system, which means that players can amass character-development resources without having resource-accumulation be the goal of their characters. But it has a degree of incoherence in its character development system: it can't decide whether character development reflects learning and training (preserves verisimilitude, but fits well with a goal-based XP system only for a narrow range of character goals) or is purely metagame (fits well with the XP system, but not with the broadly "realistic medieval immersion" flavour of play the game tries to cultivate in other aspects of its mechanics).It's also a natural consequence of this alternative mechanical approach that the role of treasure, and especially magical treasure, be downplayed (Conan D20 takes a similar approach here). But this removes one of the obviously fun bits of D&D, its wide range of wakcy and powerful magic items.Returning to the discussion of D&D modules: if players have 3E expectations, then I would think that White Plume Mountain has a good chance of sucking for them. I think 1E probably cultivated a slightly different set of expectations - resource-type play was less important, and meta-game cleverness, outwitting the DM and so on more highly emphasised. I think this is also what is going on in the design of the Tomb of Horrors. It's personally not a style of play I enjoy, but to each their own!</blockquote>

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