History of theGM?

[Rob MacDougall]

Hi everyone. Great topic.!

Some of this (the shift from player-driven wander-around-on-a-map adventures to GM-driven story-adventures) has been discussed before, for instance in a 2003 thread called Precursors to AD&D2. I point this out not to squelch further discussion but to encourage it. I'm a historian and I love these history threads.

Sean and others with strong feelings about Dragonlance might be interested in my description of Dragonlance in that thread (see the bottom post on the first page of the thread, and subsequent discussion). I'm not trying to change anyone's mind about Dragonlance, just to parse out exactly how and when things changed.

I think Marco's point above about the importance of literal dungeon walls cannot be overstated. The dungeon corridors were a map of possible story paths. Moving out of the dungeon (or pseudo-dungeons like keyed wilderness maps) changed the relation of the players to the adventure immensely and required (or seemed to require) all sorts of more subtle coercions.

In that old thread, I wrote:

Proposition for discussion (possibly a separate thread): the general disappearance of detailed dungeon maps from adventures, which seemed at the time to be a move away from hoary old “wargaming” towards narrative “story creation,” actually represented a huge shift in decision-making power from the players to the GM.

You can see the difference in the Dragonlance adventures; you can see it even more starkly in some of the other games John Kim and others have mentioned above. Compare Call of Cthulhu or Top Secret adventures published in 1983 or before (which really are dungeon crawls) to those published around 1986 or 1987 or after. There is a clear shift somewhere in that period from keyed maps to event timelines and clue trails.

[Doug Ruff]

You can see the difference in the Dragonlance adventures; you can see it even more starkly in some of the other games John Kim and others have mentioned above. Compare Call of Cthulhu or Top Secret adventures published in 1983 or before (which really are dungeon crawls) to those published around 1986 or 1987 or after. There is a clear shift somewhere in that period from keyed maps to event timelines and clue trails.

I think that shift came earlier in AD&D - have any of you seen "The Secret of Bone Hill" (1981) and "The Assassin's Knot" (1983) modules? They're a 2-part fantasy detective story, complete with clue trails and timelines.

[Rob MacDougall]

I do remember Bone Hill. Wow. I didn't know it was that old.

I could be wrong about those dates above; that was just from memory. Somebody with a good collection of old modules could possibly sketch out a timeline. But they'll run up against the problem that people were playing D&D and RPGs in general in lots of different ways in the early days (this is of course the subject of Ron's Hard Look at D&D Essay).

[John Kim]

You can see the difference in the Dragonlance adventures; you can see it even more starkly in some of the other games John Kim and others have mentioned above. Compare Call of Cthulhu or Top Secret adventures published in 1983 or before (which really are dungeon crawls) to those published around 1986 or 1987 or after. There is a clear shift somewhere in that period from keyed maps to event timelines and clue trails.

I think that shift came earlier in AD&D - have any of you seen "The Secret of Bone Hill" (1981) and "The Assassin's Knot" (1983) modules? They're a 2-part fantasy detective story, complete with clue trails and timelines.

Hmm.  I don't know "The Secret of Bone Hill", but I'm sure the change in module structure didn't happen overnight.  The original "Ravenloft" module was in 1983.  It had a combination of loose story structure (i.e. the gypsy fortune telling and epilog) with the keyed location format.  But the story was randomized and very non-linear.  I think around 1981, story structure in modules was the exception.  I see that "The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth" and "Dwellers of the Forbidden City" were from that year -- which were flavorful dungeon crawls with no story structure.  (Check out Bobby Hitt's database at  http://www.pen-paper.net/rpgdb.php?op=showline&gamelineid=8 for some listings.)  I suspect there's a gradual change in the character of modules over time.  

It's interesting to read Gary Allen Fine's book, "Shared Fantasy", which was published in 1983 but based on studies mainly in 1979 to 1981 or so.  The GM-as-auteur is definitely there and discussed in his book, but not entirely dominant.