I'm getting back into playing Dungeons & Dragons after many years. My group is planning to play 4th edition for the fist time. I like a lot of what I've seen in 4e. The core mechanic is elegant—something that fist edition's most ardent admirers would hesitate to claim about their system. Learning 4e has provoked much discussion about its relative merits, and caused me to think about general roleplaying topics, such as what makes an adventure fun and memorable?
Not everyone will agree on which adventures are best, but I'm curious if I can identify any common elements that cause many people to name some of the same adventures as their favorites.
Someone in this EN World thread, which asked players to list their favorite adventures, observed that people who grew up playing old school modules liked them because of nostalgia. Others contested that, asserting that old school adventures had their own unique charms—that criteria for what makes a good classic adventure differs from the criteria for a good contemporary module.
I played a fair amount of old school D&D, but mostly home made adventures. So, I'm doing some research about what people say makes a good adventure, and if there are significantly different types of good adventures with distinct sets of criteria. I'd like to find a few of the possible answers to these questions:
James Maliszewski makes a distinction between locale based modules versus plot based adventure stories. While all adventures contain locales and usually at least some semblance of a backstory, old school adventures were mostly maps with room descriptions. What story there is in old school adventures exists as an excuse to shepherd the PC's from place to place, and rarely exhibits the Aristotelean unity of a satisfying beginning, middle, and end. An old school adventure demand no plot, although it leaves room for the PC's to create their own plot inside its (barely even) skeletal framework. New adventures tend to be plot-driven. The authors of the module create a complete narrative in which the PC's can play a part.
In short: does the module attempt to tell a story, or does it provide a setting for the PC's story? The former is new school, the latter is old school.
Matthew J. Finch wrote A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming, in which he describes "four 'Zen Moments' where a fundamental modern gaming concept is turned completely on its head by the 0e approach [...] but once you accept the mirror-image logic [...] it suddenly makes sense".
0e is very old school. I did own the three little saddle-stitched books (inherited from my dad), but I never played those rules.* Still, Finch's Zen moments feel familiar:
Rulings, not Rules: In 0e, there isn't a specific rule for every (or even most) circumstances. The written rules act as guidelines for the DM. The players try to do things, and the DM makes rulings about the outcome—the players shouldn't/can't know much about the mechanics.
The 0e approach is good in that it encourages more imaginative play, but it does place a far greater burden on the DM. 4e is in many ways more rules-light than any edition since 0e. Also, just because rules exist does not mean players or DM have to use them; the 1e games I played informally talked-through a lot of situations which were covered somewhere in the official rules. 3e was probably the worst as far as favoring rules over imaginative play.
Player Skill, not Character Abilities: What a character can do and how well he can do them depends on the skills of the player in 0e. Is the NPC lying? The player needs to ask the right questions to find out for himself, not rely on a Detect Lie skill.
As with the point above, 0e encourages imaginative play in a way that second and third edition do not. On the other hand, player skills can be limiting; I don't always want to play a character who shares my strengths and limitations. In many of the games I played, the player had the option to talk his way through a situation, or he could choose to roll for it. The DM can encourage roleplaying by making an ability check less likely to succeed (i.e.—the more specifics a player provides for his character's actions, the more likely the character is to succeed.)
Heroic, not Superhero: 0e characters start as barely more powerful than an average Joe. In later editions character aspire to godhood; in 0e they aspire to perhaps a small duchy.
I would point out that that this has something to do with the fact that the early edition rules were not well balanced for very low or very high level characters. That encouraged a game of heroic rather than superheroic scale. 0e and 1e were simply more enjoyable games for level 5-16 characters. This also depends on what type of game you want; perhaps 0e tended toward low fantasy, but even 1e had devils and gods. Clearly 4e encourages High Fantasy.
Forgetting game balance is a harder pill for me to swallow, because every other article in Dragon drummed into me the importance of game balance when I was a young DM. I believe his argument, though. I believe that the game won't wreck itself if there are minor, temporary power inequities—if one player gets a magic sword a few levels too powerful it will work itself out. The argument about whether characters should be allowed to casually wander into encounters that can lead to a total party kill is a slightly different issue, I think, and one that has been much discussed lately. I happen to fall on the sandbox side of that debate, but I'm not sure it's really part of the old school/new school dichotomy.
One of the ways in which game balance has long been a problem is low level magic users. They have too few hit points for combat, and they spend the entire adventure saving their spells for the big bad guy. This is important because a 1st level wizard in 4e is actually fun to play, something that is hard to say about earlier editions. Perhaps Finch would say that I'm focusing too much a combat or not being creative enough about magic users, but I say the Vancian magic mechanics pretend to create balance while actually limiting imaginative play. That kind of resource management just doesn't seem very fun.
The crux of Finch's thinking seems to be: 0e is a game of exploration in which characters make their way through the game world by way of the players' dialog with their DM, whereas new school D&D deemphasizes exploration in favor of cinematic (rules governed) combat.
One frequent objection I've read—and this is usually made directly against Finch's old style example of the mysterious moose head—is that Finch's approach amounts to pixel bitching, and as such isn't any kind of improvement over skill checks. I can only assume that such critics are either being deliberately obtuse or the gaming groups they've known suffered from a lack of goodwill. In video games, pixel bitching is a problem only when the player know what needs to be done but the interface is too finicky to understand his intentions. A good old school DM, to the contrary, gives the players all the joys of an Infocom or Lucas Arts adventure game—by making them work for a solution—but without the frustration of pixel bitching. Pixel bitching is only a concern if there's so little maturity and trust in your group that negotiating the resolution of a game action is like negotiating a legal contract between adversarial parties. A more apt video game analogy is between rolling a new school spot check without any player elaboration, and button mashing.
I haven't found much of a write-up from Finch about 4e. In A Quick Primer, he says that he's played 4e only a few time, and finds that it still privileges combat over exploration, though 4e's streamlined rules make that combat more enjoyable. In a 2009 interview, Finch says
There was a perceptive post on Gnome Stew, which hinted at the reasons the 4e mechanics strike an old school chord in me:
In its attempt to simplify, simplify, simplify, 4E tossed out a lot of the rules for things like crafting, animal companions, familiars, spell research, etc… and a lot of people’s complaints (mine included) was that this narrowing of focus removed a lot of actions and playstyles from the realm of possibility. But that’s not really the case. Did I really get so forgetful of my RPG roots that I had taken the position that a lack of rules for owning a dog meant I couldn’t own one? Indeed I had.
But what’s more is that strangely, by focusing on little more than combat and skill checks, and therefor allowing for 1e style open play, 4e is, in a way, the closest spiritual successor to 1e in the history of DnD.
4e could be run as the most old school game since 0e, if you don't pay too much attention to the MMORPG cruft. Although, the 4e rules are clearly tuned for a High Fantasy, high magic world rather than a gritty, low fantasy one.
* I think the first rules I actually played were the 1978 blue box Holmes basic rules, which I inherited from my dad. I don't think I played very long until someone gave me the 1981 basic and expert rules with the Erol Otus covers. I continued to play those books for a while, even after I started playing some 1e AD&D. I think I was probably running my own campaign by '85 or '86 with other kids from the neighborhood. I won't pretend that these games were at all sophisticated in the way Matt Finch describes old school gaming.