Re: edition wars

On 11/13/24 16:46, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

 2nd Ed definitely was better when it came to campaign expansions than
with its modules. There were a handful of great adventures ("Dragon
Mountain", "Planescape: Dead Gods", "Rod of Seven Parts") but on the
whole I remember the edition more for its stuff like the
aforementioned "DMGR3 Arms & Equipment Guide", "Ravenloft Boxed Set"
and "Aurora's Whole Realms Catalog".

Yes, some of the campaign expansions were great. Some of the more generic things like the Odyssey line as well.
I still don't know what to think about other stuff though, e.g. the whole line of Dark Sun adventures. They were ultimately... fine. Not great. Just fine.
On the other hand Planescape had a higher amount of usable material from what I have seen.
(don't get me started on the Forgotten Realms which I started to despise at that time, which only solidified with 3rd edition)

Which was fine with me, because that was the era when I pretty much
stopped using retail adventures and started building up my own
campaign worlds. I still _bought_ them, being the good little consumer
(as "research" and "inspiration", I told myself) but most never really
interested me enough to run them.

Oh yes, I call it collecting. Of course I don't really collect, I just like having particular stuff in the shelf.

       [Some were just horrible, though. Pretty much everything
       Dragonlance did in 2nd Ed was just _awful_.]

I think it just outlived itself. The original Dragonlance adventures might not be my favorite, but they told a story. The whole franchise was basically desperately searching for what it's point was afterwards, and failing.

 But I'm not really surprised. The game itself was changing. Early 1E
adventures were either extremely simplistic, or often whole
supplements unto themselves. They were good not so much for their
adventures but because of the realms they described for us. But with
TSR putting out more stand-alone campaign material, the modules
focused more on _just_ the adventures... and those just weren't
satisfactory on their own.
 

I would claim that it made more money as well. It's a bit of a perverse intent: the more you focused on just the adventure the more you had to shell out for additional modules.
Funnily enough I didn't see that as so much of a problem in the 90s when I was socialized into RPGs with The Dark Eye, which had this model from the beginning. It was a revelation later when I realized how stuff like Keep on the Borderlands was intended to give longer-lasting material for adventures, not just a single plotline.
But yes, this became much more of a thing in the 90s. People started to want the event driven adventures that 5e seems to have perfected. I personally don't really like it, but it's an expression of roleplaying just like the older types.

TL;DR: don't disagree with 2E modules, but I think it the decline has
less to do with the system and more to do with how the industry was
changing overall.