Re: edition wars

On Fri, 8 Nov 2024 18:33:48 +0100, Kyonshi <gmkeros@gmail.com> wrote:

On 11/8/2024 2:55 PM, Justisaur wrote:
>

I rarely if ever used 2e modules when I played 2e. Pretty much all
homebrew or occasional 1e modules converted.
 
I still think the majority of modules for 3e+ are pale garbage compared
to the 1e & Basic modules.  The most fun I've had playing 5e is right
now my friend is running us through a an official converted B4 The Lost
City.
 
There was a couple parts of an adventure path I really enjoyed that he
ran in 3e-3.5e, the rest of it was meh at best. I ran a different one
which I found pretty bad.  I read a starter module that sounded really
good but I never got around to running it.  I enjoyed running the
starter module for 4e, but everything after that was not good on both
sides.
 
I did run a couple 3e campaigns that were very homebrew I enjoyed, but
nothing in 3.5e or 4e homebrew turned out well.  5e was more hit and
miss, I never got anything past 8th level, and there was one I ran with
converted KotB that didn't go well, but Zenopus and Lost Isle of
Castanamir did.  I did have one homebrew I ran I kind of wished I'd kept
going that I ended at 5th I think when I had difficulty keeping up with
the pace of creating the adventures.
 

>
I have been going through a lot of old modules to pick out the ones that
I actually would want to play nowadays, and from 3e on the whole way
they are written has changed so much that many of them are pretty much
worthless in my opinion.
I remember going through some of the adventure modules when 3e was new,
and I found it neither enjoyable, nor did my players really invest work
in understanding the system.
A good scenario from 2e or earlier is still kind of worth playing though.
Not that there are so many of them. The railroad tendencies that later
would make 3e so boring to me already were worming their way into them.

I generally agree. It's not so much that I think the new modules are
trying to railroad the players as that all the focus of the adventures
on the encounters, which leaves the rest of the world feeling so
barren that DMs just jump the PCs from one encounter to the next. It's
why later editions feel so combat-heavy and the characters so
comic-book superpowered; getting into constant scrabbles is all the
modules talk about.

Earlier modules put more effort into the in-between spaces, so the PCs
had some place to fuck around (usually to their own detriment). It let
them get lost, or follow the wrong lead, or get stuck in the minutea
of surviving in a hostile environment. It was often frustrating and
wasted a lot of time, but it made any eventual success all the more
sweet.

I'm not sure the intent of newer modules was to abandon the old style
of gameplay, rather than instead transfer this load to other
supplements. Why bother to describe all the NPCs and monsters and
landscape where the adventure will take place IN THE MODULE when it's
already been well covered in the campaign guide-book? The idea being
that the DM would use the main sourcebook to fill in those 'in-between
spaces', and then the modules could be laser-focused on the actual
EVENTS of the adventure. It was a matter of efficiency.

Except... that's not how most DMs are going to run their games. Some
might not own the sourcebook, others might not know that they needed
it, others might just be lazy. So the end result was to use the
modules as the end-all/be-all of the adventure, which led to
led-by-the-nose campaigns where you jump from one encounter to the
next without the DM nor the players really needing to figure out how
to get from the one to the next.

Until that became the EXPECTED way of doing things, and now some
players and DMs rebel against open-world modules which expect you to
fill in the blanks for yourself.

(Not all of them though, which is what I think led to the divisiveness
of 4th Edition, which embraced the new 'encounter-first' philosophy,
which so turned off some players that it spawned 'old school gaming'
systems.)

5th Edition seems to trying to strike a balance between the two
philosophies, although for some (myself included) any compromise in
this regard is too much.



TL;DR: WOTC created the event-first adventure modules in the name of
efficiency and playtested it amongst experienced DMs who knew how to
read between the lines, but failed to take into account the average
D&D group isn't quite so inspired.