For what it's worth, there's a free demo (for Mac and PC) of Warcraft III on the Blizzard War3 site. It has a brief tutorial, and then goes into a semi-exclusive mission that definitely shows you what adventures in Azeroth are like, from dungeon crawls to inter-faction warfare.
More directly on topic, I've always found Dragonlance to be unplayable. While I love the 3E FRCS, the overwhelming amount of preexisting detail (and the probability players will know the novels and other material better than me) has been a turn-off as well.