wrote: oving some stuff around tonight, I uncovered a couple of dusty old notebooks. They appeared to be from my last year of highschool and first year of college. One of them contained the outline for my AD&D uber-adventure: SACENAD (Super Awesome Cool Excellent Nasty Adventure of Death).

I remember this all quite clearly. SACENAD was created because I was sick of the ultrapowerful oneupsmanship going on in our AD&D game. Every problem was met with a magic item solution -- Vampires? Staff of Light. Giants? Sword of Giant Slaying. Green Slime? Keoghtum's Ointment. I hated it! There was nothing I could throw at them -- so I felt -- that would challenge my friend's uberpowerful characters.

I wrote up SACENAD. The idea? My friends would have to navigate a challenging high level dungeon without benefit of any of their magic items. But how to accomplish such a task? They certainly weren't going to simply agree to it! We were a covetous bunch, and to be caught without your trusty Rod of Resurrection meant a character might actually die!

I'll let me of 17 years speak. This is my dialogue intro, to be read to the players:

17 year old Luke wrote:
Remember! War of attrition.

Ah...back again -- in nasty, fun, dirty, lawful (w/ decent guards), good ol' Skarg! And soon after your excursion to the Isle of the Ape that was so successful. But, alas, you get only a short repreive from action. You hear that you are being looked for by a merchant/cleric of Odin, Jim, that works for Odin in the richer district.

(Wait for the players to say, "let's go look for him.")

17 year old Luke then]
You find Jim working in a small but elaborate building. He is selling small holy household trinkets, mugs with Odin on them, salt shakers in the shape of a hammer. Upon entering, Jim addresses you, "Greetings (list names), I see you heard that I needed assistance. It is not just I who needs assistance, but the Almighty One also. (Act holy!) It seems that the same person that has been looting the temples has also been assassinating our clerics. We have limited information on this !evil! but we know that he has fled Skarg to here (point out on map). I request that you go find this scoundrel and return the stolen items. (Do they accepts?) (If not, just sit there and stare.)

Gotta say, though, you were one thorough feller as a 17-year-old. Seriously, though, if I had written notes anywhere near as...complete...I'm sure they would have looked much the same. I carried all that railroading technique in my head, always ready to be deployed.

droog wrote:
Gotta say, though, you were one thorough feller as a 17-year-old.

That was awesome.  If I happened upon something that far into my younger-self-style (and I'm sure I've done stuff as embarrassing, we all have, I've just blocked it from long term memory) I don't think that I would have the sheer guts to post it that way.  That's inspirational.  Good on you!

I must thank the great and unforgotten Greg Costykian for writing, in Star Wars d6, 1987, a complete instruction on how to railroad in a (more or less) functional way. I do clearly remember writing instructions to myself, though.

- Frank

Maybe you should use it for Elfs, Luke?

droog wrote:
Maybe you should use it for Elfs, Luke?

Amatuer ;-)

MY D&D Magnum Opus was a scenario that was over 100 pages (typed) long.
Every room in a 3 story castle with 3 levels of crypts had at least two pages of description.  Every entry was broken down by
Approach:  what they see when the near the room
Quick Glance:  what they see when they reach the room (before the monsters attack)
Good Look:  what they see when they have time to look around (after they kill the monsters)
Quick Search:  what they find if the roll the room quickly (including a table for how long it takes based on who searches)
Thorough Search:  what happens if they look for every last possible thing (ditto table).

Then each room had the DM's section where I had elaborate notes for what nasty screw jobs the army of kobolds and hobgoblins would do complete with if/then strategy trees and responses to my players favorite spells.  Nothing quite like providing a tribe of kobolds with a shaman who was an alchemist and could churn out potions of fire immunity and free action like nothing.  Of course they're kobold potions which means any PC who tries to drink the nauseating mixture has to make a Con check or fall into helpless retching for 1d6 rounds.

Of course once the kobolds were cleared out they had to tackle the crypts...and we all know what lives down in crypts...yup...my players learned to hate being attacked by skeletons and giant spiders at the same time.  Even high level clerics run out of cure poisons eventually...

I was a master at taking low level monsters and fucking over high level parties...and then having low level town officials take all their hard won treasure away...after making them figure out exactly how they were going to cart away 100,000 gold pieces worth of copper and silver pieces.  Heh...adventurers by day, accountants and teamsters by night...

As I mentioned at lunch, the part that really struck me about your initial post was how good you were at spotting areas that would lead to dysfunction. Your solutions were problematic, but even then you (and I imagine this is true of most GMs) were able to predict the areas of your own scenario that would cause problems for the players.

Ok Ralph, I've been in that applecart before. Why would you do it? And why would the players come back for more?

-L

I do wonder if it has something to do with the game, or the group. Because my grand self-written adventure was total "Look at how cool this is" Pseudo-Sim play. Railroading as well, at least how they got there (shipwrecked on an island; no escape from my game!) and what they'd encounter. But the idea was not to beat them, but to show them all these nifty creatures, items, and NPCs. Just like your game was Pseudo-Gamist (as you said, there was little room for Stepping On Up against your monsters and traps), mine clearly was off the path of Sim but really wanted to be there.

We played Das Schwarze Auge, which puts a lot of emphasis on setting exploration, bringing about this complete world, etc. I think that was a big influence. Especially because we played lots of modules. Did you use modules as well? I think there's a whole lot of analysis we could do on how those pre-made adventures influence and determine what we think of as proper play styles.

Reading Valamir's response made me think immediately of how the old Das Schwarze Auge modules used to structure information in a similar way: a) What's plain to see b) What takes some time to discover and c) what only the GM is supposed to know. It was widely considered a fatal blunder, if you accidentally slipped into b) or (gasp!) c), while reading out loud a) - there were vague suggestions of paraphrasing a), but we didn't know what that meant, anyway. Getting to b) invariably required a spot or social interaction roll of some kind, and if all players failed, tough luck. c) ist interesting, because the modules swayed between advising you to hand out these informations only to particularly shrewd players as a kind of reward or just keeping them for yourself to get a better grasp of the "atmosphere". My understanding at the time was that this information must. not. be . found. out. by. the. players. ever. So in what is probably one of the most detailed gaming worlds evah with  flavor texts highlighting setting exploration as a main goal of the game, you had "hide the backstory" entrenched right there. I'm so glad these days are over for me. 

abzu wrote: What I really want to know is where this came from? I played in a group of 5 boys. Four of us were roughly the same age. One, Jon, was older by a few years.

abzu wrote:
Ok Ralph, I've been in that applecart before. Why would you do it? And why would the players come back for more?

-L

Wow!
Ralph, this is exactly the mood and motivation of my group's play for more that ten years. I was famous as a GM for these kind of tricks (colorful descriptions, ease "immersion", fast paced combats in the climax). My abilities as "ilusionist" were improving constantly, and everyone was happy.

However, I begun to get tired. The stories where always the same lamb with a different skin. It was a real pitty that we didn't discover other kind of games on those times.

Then, I tried to create a nice "realistic" (low-fantasy) world with more interesting stories about human behaviour and decissions which implied real conflicts. And we played it with our beloved Basic/Expert D&D set, to recover the old "flavor". Amazingly, it was working at the beginning. But as the characters improved level by level, the system was pressing me to transform the campaing to a more "highly-epic" mood, and I didn't know how to deal with it. Moreover, on those times we were not able to play more than some sessions during summer and some sessions on Christmas holydays. I had so much time to "prepare" the world inbetween that it become an incredible collection of cartography, ecology, colorfull descriptions, myths, tales, main characters who were not PCs (a lot of stuff that players were not involved with, and that they were forgeting from session to session). And the worst, I prepared marvellous perfectly nailed stories to be played by them (or may I say "be told to them"). Without noticing, I moved from "trailblazing" to much more boring "railroading", full of color details that only me was enjoying. The black curtain finally felt. We tried to talk about it, but all the stuff I had generated was pressing me a lot to appear in the games and I made the same mistakes a couple of times more. The interest of my players dissapeared, my interest (which always was to create fun) dissapeared, and we stoped to play. Without any pain.

We had some more tries, from time to time, with small stories and other not so different games. But the high excitement was not there again, except ocassionaly. Tabletop and card games substituted RPGs for a long time (many years). But now... I'm coming back again. I hope that wiser and provided with better tools for what I want to do.

Cheers,
Arturo

RE: Valamir's post above:

I don't think what you describe is necessarily dysfunctional. It actually sounds kind of like fun. Heavy flavor text to keep the mood, yes. But also because in a GM vs PCs type game, the detail of the descriptions becomes part of the currency of the game, in that it is used strategically by both GM and PCs. And we had a lot of fun with that kind of thing back in the day, even when playing Freeform. Heck, *especially* when playing FF. That level of detail became the field on which to maneuver, in the sense that:

The GM describes the surroundings and situation. Usually having one or two possible "escape routes" or "solutions" to the situation in mind, but open to other possibilities.

The players take the GMs description and try to figure out a solution to the current dilemma using whatever is at hand.

The "game" exists in the negotiation between the players and GM about what actions are possible given the description given.

The difference that makes this not necessarily "railroading" or dysfunctional is that the players were allowed a limited measure of Director stance, at the GM's discretion, generally phrased as questions: "So, does the porticullis have a rope or a chain holding it up?", where the GM, if he hadn't already determined that, might be interested to know where the player is going with it, and make the decision based as much on his interest in the player's ideas as on his own.

Yes it was competition between the two sides, but it was also an excercize in imagination, and there was a lot of respect accorded to both figuring out the way to squeeze through the GM-created situations, and especially doing so in imaginative, unexpected, and cool ways.

I guess it was pure Gamism, in that the joy of the game, while based on niggling details, was really about "Dude! luring the dragon through the gate with the smell of cooking goblin meat and then dropping the porticullis on him was AWESOME!"

Okay, I'm gonna stop now, cuz I think I've made whatever point I was after... I really should have slept a couple more hours >.<

Joshua wrote:
[Someday, I will make a documentary by videotaping a gaming session, and putting that in half the screen opposite a group of male monkeys in their native habitat.  Watch the dominance games play out on both sides parallel to each other.

Arturo G wrote: It was a real pitty that we didn't discover other kind of games on those times.

Nev the Deranged wrote: I don't think what you describe is necessarily dysfunctional. It actually sounds kind of like fun.

abzu wrote: I was wondering if you could be more condescending in your next post? This is an excellent example, but I think if you try harder you can do it!

;)

Hi Luke,

Just looking past the use of stick and berating ourselves over it for a moment, let's talk about carrot. How much mutual appreciation of tactics was shown at the table? Even for the small stuff - like "Hey, that party order turned out to be a good idea?". Was appreciation passed between players? Was appreciation passed from the GM to players? And just as importantly, was appreciation passed from players to GM?

Hi Ralph,

And the bitter fights were tinged with the very strong sense that you lost everything if you lost the arguement, right? Well, mine were. No matter how much death defying you did, when the arguement came up it was like putting all the money you just won from that death defying on one gamble. Which naturally fueled arguement to extremes. Way off?

It's funny, all that death defying gets you a certain respect currency. But it's nothing in comparison to the currency that's involved in a real life person to person face off.

abzu wrote:

Joshua wrote: Someday, I will make a documentary by videotaping a gaming session, and putting that in half the screen opposite a group of male monkeys in their native habitat.  Watch the dominance games play out on both sides parallel to each other.

I was wondering if you could be more condescending in your next post? This is an excellent example, but I think if you try harder you can do it! ;)

Callan wrote:
But it's nothing in comparison to the currency that's involved in a real life person to person face off.

A valiant attempt to drag the discussion back to topic Droog.

I actually think that Rules Lawyering is a direct response to the railroad.  At least in retrospect that's how it evolved in our play.

Originally our play was very much what usenet folks would recognize as Sim.  Go any where, do anything, the GM is entirely the neutral referee who responds to the PCs free choices.  But as we began to assign more and more value to the mood and "realism" establishing narration described above it became more and more impossible to prepare material to the level of depth required to make the game "good" that could cover all possible contingencies.

That's where the Illusionism started for us originally, simply a survival tactic for the GM to use basic techniques like "Roads to Rome" to limit the amount of the world that he'd actually have to prep to a manageable (for kids on summer vacation with nothing better to do) size.

Shortly thereafter is where the one upsmanship between DMs started to see who could have the coolest stories, most detailed backstory, biggest surprise twist, most memorable scene, etc.  From there the arena kept getting smaller and smaller and tighter and tighter as adventures became a way primarily to show case the DMs adventure design talent and less about actually playing the adventure.  The ultimate result was linear adventure design on very narrow rails that worked like one of those fun house rides where the car may loop around and rotate on a very convoluted track, but none-the-less the track was specifically laid out to take you point by point to where all the cool stuff was to see.

At that point the ONLY influence players had in the game was tactics in combat which in AD&D 1e when not actually moving minis around on a battle mat was very limited (basically what weapon to use, which monster to swing at, and when to drink the heal potion).  That's when the rules lawering started.  I can get the game to move in the direction I want if I can show that the direction you want is illegal.

Valamir wrote: At that point the ONLY influence players had in the game was tactics in combat which in AD&D 1e when not actually moving minis around on a battle mat was very limited (basically what weapon to use, which monster to swing at, and when to drink the heal potion).  That's when the rules lawering started.  I can get the game to move in the direction I want if I can show that the direction you want is illegal.

Ralph, great account! So you couldn't just agree to enjoy participationism, because there was a competitive element to session design that asked for judgement?

So the question was always "Do you like this game I made?". It never became a different question "Would you like to try out a different game type (participationism), something you might ordinarily think you wouldn't like"

While at the same time, game design necessitated some restriction (mapping everything is just impossible). Initially the GM's discover this is a great tool to help them 'win' the game design competition. However, over time and more extensive use this gets some amount of negative feedback.

In responce, the GM adds more cool stuff so as to get a good rating. This requires more restriction so that stuff is actually experienced. This earns further negative feedback. And so on, in a classic deathspiral.

Way off? The GM trying to win the game of 'make the players/my friends happy'. But if players are allowed to wander off the prepared areas, they wont find anything that makes them happy. Worse, even though they were the ones who decided to wander off 'the map', they get to call that as the GM's fault and give him a bad rating.

On the opposing side, the players want freedom AND engaging content. Essentially two mutually exclusive goals.

I think I've played that game a few times.

Valamir wrote:
....as we began to assign more and more value to the mood and "realism" establishing narration described above it became more and more impossible to prepare material to the level of depth required to make the game "good" that could cover all possible contingencies.That's where the Illusionism started for us....

Callan wrote:
On the opposing side, the players want freedom AND engaging content. Essentially two mutually exclusive goals.

Sydney wrote: Now, is this the most common process by which old-school "wander 'round the dungeon" D&D (which was pretty functional and fun a lot of the time) turned into "I am Gamemaster, I have Story!" railroading (not so functional)?

Good point. I think that the module as instructional tool has been overlooked in many cases as the culprit in creating methods of play.

Mike

There's no single cause for railroading. It can be a desire for story, or a lack of creativity, or an adolescent power trip, or lots of other things.

Old-school gaming as I experienced it was not railroady though. You had a map, some encounters, some random encounter tables, and, if you were good, notes on the personalities of a few NPCs so you could do some social interactions that led somewhere interesting. It's very much a 'jazz' GMing form but without the 'Narrativist' content - it's all about mutual response between the players. The dungeon is a living entity, responding to what the players do, and they try to grok its whole structure and complexity and outthink it before it gets them.

Trying to run with dungeon geomorphs and a monster & treasure assortment, and nothing else prepared, is a good way to learn how to do this even today. The trick to making it good is that when the players decide to talk to the blink dogs instead of fighting them, or come up with some interesting theory about the trap and who put it there, or whatever, you find a way to work it into the adventure, so that they can create meaning out of the random events that initially constitute the dungeon.

Now, is this the most common process by which old-school "wander 'round the dungeon" D&D (which was pretty functional and fun a lot of the time) turned into "I am Gamemaster, I have Story!" railroading (not so functional)?

Mike wrote:
Good point. I think that the module as instructional tool has been overlooked in many cases as the culprit in creating methods of play.

I've said this before, but I think it's interesting that the text like this that's in the Hackmaster modules is only slightly exaggerated. That is, it tends to go on at length about stuff like this, but it was all in the original copies of the modules being parodied. Check out the introduction to an old D&D module, and one of the parallel Hackmaster modules to see what I mean. Often the Hackmaster version simply lays bare the subtext of the original.

Mike

Mike,

If it's not thread drift, could you be more explicit? I don't understand your 'like this'. I'd disagree if you were responding to Brand and if by 'old' you meant the pastels (which you almost must have, since most of the HM parodies are of the pastels). But maybe I don't understand what your 'like' is. Like what?

Callan wrote: When you run low on riffing enthusiasm, if system doesn't keep the game flowing regardless, as GM you start to rely on force techniques to get players to where you do have some enthusiasm left.

I've never heard the term "pastels" before, but I think we're talking about the same thing. The modules typified by the "Giant" and "Underworld" ("D" series) stuff. I'll have to grab one when I have a chance to make a direct reference, but in those series there is a lot of text that amounts to "GM Hints for Play" interspersed with the rest of the text. Often in odd contexts, and almost throw away at times.

One I can remember specifically (because I just happened to re-read it recently) is in the Descent Into the Depths where it talks about traveling in the underworld, and that the party can't teleport in and out. The surrounding text is telling the GM essentially to use whatever plot methods are neccessary to ensure that the party has to follow the rout that leads through the labeled encounters.

I haven't read the hackmaster version of this particular module, but I'm betting that it says this stuff, just much more explicitly. Now this example is specific to linear scenario railroading, but not all modules will have that. I'm not saying that they all, or even most of them, promote railroading. Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, for example is just a map, and one that can be entered from many points, in fact. So it doesn't have railroading subtext. But it has other challenge related subtext. For example, there's a long explanation for why the steading can't simply be burnt down, no matter what the PCs bring to bear. The subtext of which is, "Don't allow the players to avoid going through the dungeon crawl by using creative means. They have to go inside and kill the giants, one by one."

These modules, despite the short length of the non-room-description parts of the text, are full of this stuff. And for my eleven year old self trying to figure out how to play AD&D, it was all very formative information. Given that a lot of it is subtextual, I'm sure that people read the modules differently, and get different ideas. But, again, I think if you read the HM versions that you'll see them extrapolating the text in the ways that I'm talking about.

Mike

Mike wrote: One I can remember specifically (because I just happened to re-read it recently) is in the Descent Into the Depths where it talks about traveling in the underworld, and that the party can't teleport in and out. The surrounding text is telling the GM essentially to use whatever plot methods are neccessary to ensure that the party has to follow the rout that leads through the labeled encounters.

Interesting to realize how quickly D&D modules went from fairly open (I consider G1s not allowing you to bypass the module completely pretty minor, especially for prep-heavy gamism, you need the players to agree to "do the module," however, short of things that bypass the challenge, player creativity should be open - which G1 did a pretty good job of) to being pretty railroady. Thinking about it, I suspect that's why I have fond memories of G1, and can hardly remember playing D1-D3 (I do remember playing Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits). I really rejected the serial dungeon form of railroading (though I'm sure I've done plenty of other railroady things).

Of course I had learned to play before modules were really available (we started with the original Basic set, complete with Dungeon Geomorphs and Encounter and Treasure Tables).

It's interesting contrasting these modules to Judge's Guild's Dark Tower that I'm running right now. Verry little railroading text in that, in fact, it doesn't really even make an assumtion whether the players will help the forces of good (Mitra), the forces of evil (Set), or none of the above.

Frank

The pastels are B1, G1-3, D1-3, S1-2, C1, and T1 - the 11 modules originally released with monochrome pastel colors. I would agree that there are some railroading elements in G1 and G2 (though G2 is one of the grandest 'series of fights' modules ever written IMO). But in general 'railroading' was understood as a bad thing by most early D&D players and it's one reason that e.g. the Dragonlance modules are and were widely hated by old-schoolers: because they took away the freedom to improvise and plan cherished by so many in the early days.

With the D series, it's funny. It's true what you say about the teleport restrictions, but there was ALSO this huge underworld map inviting to be filled in, which you could travel all around and get way off the planned adventure if you wanted. The 'sunless sea' 4-hex area was especially intriguing. Lots of GMs I knew filled in those areas and ran extended underdark campaigns connected to but distinct from the drow epic.

What I don't see in those modules though is the particular thing Brand was talking about where an NPC essentially bullies the players into doing what he wants and the players have no option to resist. There is a lot of latitude for interpreting individual encounters, most extremely in D3 and T1. (Our run of D3 involved much more politics and hot elf-drow sex than fighting, and might have been construed as an early stab at narrativism - the main protagonist was beloved of the surface-world elf-queen, but seducing Eclavdra was his most effective route to staving off the Drow invasion, setting up some moral hand-wringing alongside the sex.) The only exception I can think of offhand is Ghost Tower of Inverness (C2, not a pastel), but there the setup is in media res - you're all in the Duke's dungeon and the Duke wants you to get this soul gem for him, so go get it or die - but it's a tournament module, so that's not exactly the same thing.

It's true that sometimes old-school modules include unwinnable fights, but this is a feature not a bug from the old PoV - players need to be smart enough to recognize these unwinnable fights and run away. They also don't say "you can't do this", they just give you an obstacle which you could concievably roll your way into overcoming, though your odds aren't good.

The genius of non-railroaded old school modules was Paul Jaquays, whose Caverns of Thracia and Dark Tower (both Judges Guild) are masterworks of this kind of design. I think that's one reason those modules (along with Tegel Manor) are so beloved, actually - they were much more 'blueprints to make your own stuff out of', as were Gygax's D3 and T1.

So anyway, I guess I disagree with you about a 'general subtext' pointing in the direction of railroading pretty strongly, though I'm sure you could find (a) some compelling instances which were (b) read that way by some fraction of the early D&D community. The 'sandbox' philosophy is much more common to the great majority of Judges Guild products and a substantial fraction of TSR ones, and a great number of people were aggravated/pissed off/left the game when the Dragonlance modules ushered in the railroading style for a much larger group of players - and was seen as 'licensing' it as well.

Monte Cook and Andy Collins both have opined that since the game contains lots of transportation and divination spells at high levels, it's the GMs responsibility to challenge players with those powers rather than to shut down on them to protect the 'secret' of the adventure etc. In general I think that's a fair assessment, though I also note that the OD&D/1e versions of many of these spells that had built-in 'bugs' (dying from teleportation, going insane from contact other plane, etc.) so that there was a real risk built into using them to compensate somewhat for this, and I don't think that's a bad approach either.

Anyway, sorry to put the grognard hat on here, but I had an extremely fun and functional early D&D experience in general, and one reason was that we felt very free to improvise things in a way that few other games provided until I discovered the Forge. IIRC you've been around a while too Mike and while I accept that other people had very dysfunctional early experiences with the game, I also think that anyone who came into D&D after '84 and in some cases a little earlier may derive very misleading assumptions about what a substantial percentage of early play was like based on the text of later supplements and rulebooks.

Sean wrote:
But in general 'railroading' was understood as a bad thing by most early D&D players and it's one reason that e.g. the Dragonlance modules are and were widely hated by old-schoolers: because they took away the freedom to improvise and plan cherished by so many in the early days.

With the D series, it's funny. It's true what you say about the teleport restrictions, but there was ALSO this huge underworld map inviting to be filled in, which you could travel all around and get way off the planned adventure if you wanted. The 'sunless sea' 4-hex area was especially intriguing. Lots of GMs I knew filled in those areas and ran extended underdark campaigns connected to but distinct from the drow epic.

What I don't see in those modules though is the particular thing Brand was talking about where an NPC essentially bullies the players into doing what he wants and the players have no option to resist.

There is a lot of latitude for interpreting individual encounters, most extremely in D3 and T1. (Our run of D3 involved much more politics and hot elf-drow sex than fighting, and might have been construed as an early stab at narrativism - the main protagonist was beloved of the surface-world elf-queen, but seducing Eclavdra was his most effective route to staving off the Drow invasion, setting up some moral hand-wringing alongside the sex.)

The only exception I can think of offhand is Ghost Tower of Inverness (C2, not a pastel), but there the setup is in media res - you're all in the Duke's dungeon and the Duke wants you to get this soul gem for him, so go get it or die - but it's a tournament module, so that's not exactly the same thing.

The genius of non-railroaded old school modules was Paul Jaquays, whose Caverns of Thracia and Dark Tower (both Judges Guild) are masterworks of this kind of design. I think that's one reason those modules (along with Tegel Manor) are so beloved, actually - they were much more 'blueprints to make your own stuff out of', as were Gygax's D3 and T1.

So anyway, I guess I disagree with you about a 'general subtext' pointing in the direction of railroading pretty strongly, though I'm sure you could find (a) some compelling instances which were (b) read that way by some fraction of the early D&D community.

The 'sandbox' philosophy is much more common to the great majority of Judges Guild products and a substantial fraction of TSR ones, and a great number of people were aggravated/pissed off/left the game when the Dragonlance modules ushered in the railroading style for a much larger group of players - and was seen as 'licensing' it as well.

Y'know, Mike, I'm pretty sure you're the one being defensive here, since all the points you bring up "against" my post I agree with and at least indirectly acknowledge in the post you're responding to. We seem to agree on most of the substantive issues here, in fact, so why the line-by-line response cattiness? It's a drag. Surely you have better things to do with your time then to project a subtext that isn't there into my posts.

Mike isnt claiming that these old modules were all railroads, but rather that as written their challenges are often narrow in scope. Yes, you can play D3 as a political thriller but whats there in black and white is a big roster of drow to hack up. One would think that if "the point" of D3 was to..I dunno, cunningly cut a deal with the anti-Llolth Drow faction...there'd be pages and pages of support for how to run that.

Ive always been puzzled by the disconnection in AD&D between the DMG and the modules. The former is full of Sim-ish stuff about noble titles and sages and the cost of mercenaries and castle building and treasure-rationing, the word "milieu" crops up every paragraph, etc.  And yet the "classic" modules to support this are nearly all Tournament adventures. Or wannabe tournaments.

Hi, NN -

I accept that my play of D3 was highly nonstandard, but it's a tangent to the discussion at hand. Mike seemed to me to be claiming, based on several earlier posts, that the implicit model of the classic dungeon crawl was a kind of disguised railroad. I queried him about that, and he either retracted the claim or else never made it in the first place.

The only relevance it has is that when you have a 'sandbox' perspective on adventures, it's much more natural to take them in different directions. It was rather common, in my experience, for people to try novel things (the kind of thing Mike seemed to be suggesting e.g. G1 ruled out, though apparently he just meant that that was one way of reading the module that was partly supported by the text) in older adventures, and for the adventures to go in weird, bizarre, and unexpected directions only loosely supported by the text (that's trivial, actually, given the style, which in turn opens questions about 'support'); but later on there really was a concerted effort, embodied in post-Dragonlance modules and much of the published 2e material, to encourage a railroaded 'story' style of play as the norm. My subsidiary point, which was not addressed to MIke, is that it's a mistake to project that style back into the early history of the game, because while one could find examples of it from the beginning, I don't think it was especially the norm until later on.

As a historical note the 'classic' adventures were mostly, but not all, tournament adventures. This was a major stage in the development of D&D, the development of tournament play, which played an important role in the way many players (and I think Gygax) perceived the game.

If I point out that you keep putting words in my mouth, and avoiding the points I made, will I get accused of being defensive again? Well, I am being defensive, as a matter of fact. You keep attributing arguments to me that I've not made. I don't get to try to correct that?

Why should I address a point you made in refutation to mine, when in fact, I never made the point in the first place?

No matter what I do here, you seem determined to make my arguments into something they're not. I said that modules teach various play methods (note, various, not railroading), and that the Hackmaster modules are only slightly exaggerating in their extrapolation of the subtextual indications in these directions. If you have some problem with one of my actual arguments, please continue to include me, Sean. Otherwise, just make your points without reference to mine.

Mike

All right, thread's closed. As usual people are hugging their personal D&D experiences so close to their own hearts that the thread topic seems to have been lost.

Best,
Ron