Welcome to this week’s blog club. This week we are looking at “How Dragonlance Ruined Everything" from 2008 by James Maliszewski (Grognardia).
Next week we’ll discuss “Shields Shall be Splintered!” from 2008 by Trollsmyth. You can see a list of previous blog club posts here.
“Dragonlance … certainly represents the end of ‘old school’ as a mainstream part of the hobby”. Discuss?
The thing I like about this blog post, as opposed to the maxim “Dragonlance Ruined Everything”, is that it takes a joking and self-mocking tone to the idea. There is something to the idea that the Hickman’s style of games, aka “Dungeons & Beavers” or “Trad” represent a big change in how D&D was designed.
Ultimately I agree - I don’t enjoy trying to run Trad games with AD&D (1E or 2E) and I think that’s something the Dragonlance adventures push pretty badly … but I was one of those OSR folks and frankly a lot of people really do like Trad style games with a fixed heroic narrative. So who’s wrong? Is anyone wrong?
Rather then that focus (which seems to be what a lot of people are getting at when they say “Dragonlance ruined everything”) I think the interesting question is how old D&D is a poor system for running the Trad/heroic narrative style game. It’s like trying to play chess with a checkers set or something.
I wrote reviews of DL 1 - Dragons of Despair a long time ago:
and DL 2 - Dragons of Flame (which is worse):
I think they reflect the same attitude that James has in this post, and I do think it’s an interesting question of how exactly D&D and its adventurers adapted to the Trad and now the OC (or contemporary trad perhaps?) style of 5E. I don’t really have an answer - because my focus has always been running dungeon crawls.
What does OC stand for in this context?
“OC” I assume means original character. So: precious characters with elaborate backstories that are used in worldbuilding/play.
I read this which helped me to understand what Gus is referring to by “OC”:
speaking to my personal experience here, I NEVER GOT DRAGONLANCE. they were hyping it so much in dragon magazine, and I got it for Xmas and was so excited… then I read it and was honestly baffled by the module. I was like, yea, but how do you PLAY THIS? the idea of that railroady narrative thing was so foreign to me, I couldn’t wrap my head around it. then… when I was like, what you have to play these characters? like, I hate these characters. it just didn’t feel like D&D to me at all.
don’t get me wrong, I think we were all craving more things in D&D that now would be described as more narrative. but that craving caused me to bounce from D&D-- along with tons of other people, dragonlance kinda rolled out during a decline. the narrative stuff I wanted I got from other games. backgrounds. “advantages and disadvantages” (in HERO sense). even games like Paranoid felt more advanced, with faction play built into the characters (and their published modules were pretty railroady, but it didn’t feel as bad).
so indeed even though, its an obvious “hot take” to say it ruined everything… it kinda did!
This was honestly the same experience I had around that time - moving to Champions and Mekton (played mostly link a series of tactical combats), Car Wars, Warhammer Fantasy, Cyberpunk, and Palladium (well mostly Robotech and TMNT)…
Thing is these systems are all pretty bad for narrative except the kind where the referee strings together a bunch of combats with a narrative … I really do think story games manage a lot of the goals of arrative play in a far more interesting way. Just as I think the OSR managed to breath life back into dungeon crawling and such in a way that’s distinct from early games.
Note for Martin - I was using OC in the way John does in the six-cultures of play post (though I think the term is a bit snarky and that “Contemporary Trad” is more descriptive).
#1 it interesting to me how popular car wars was. damn I played a lot of that. I think because it worked as 1v1 I could play it more easily. and also, what a fun game when you had 3-4 cars. and what a shit game waiting around for your turn if there were more players. that game totally prefigures character build RPGs…
#2 back to bouncing off D&D due to dragonlance: we totally did the thing playing champions where basically it was 1/2 of session narrative, second half one giant fight that took forever. almost never using a pre published module. you just think of a place, an enemy, and let the system cook. I distinctly remember one session where the setup was in a convenience store, and the PCs NEVER LEFT THE STORE for the rest of the session. there were so many triggers with the disadvantages, started with one PC getting enraged at the clerk, then someone’s enemies randomly showed up, then a dependent, etc. it was just a complete shitshow, but still very fun.
Yeah, Champions was awesome for “no adventure planned? Just let the players’ disadvantages make the session happen!”