I fear it is a little bit more depressing. I nowadays think it rapidly co-evolved with the true feelings & tastes of the audience...

EDIT: But there was hijacking, and it is a problem for the core audience itself, as fresh blood is hard to come by...more on that later

Also look at your screen name: "Lord of the Mists".
Obfuscation and romanticism (= Mists) , coupled with "will to power"( = Lord), qed, I rest my case.

First of all, it would be Lord of fog, not Lord of the Mists wich would mean Tauherr. Second of all is my Sceenname the name of a German Dragon in the Fantasy world of Shadowrun.

the players get to imagine to wander the landscapes and feel unity with their chosen group of like-minded emotionally aware fellows. That they do not sing-a-long more is a miracle...

That is rather odd. I seldom played in a chosen group of like-minded emotionally aware fellows. We once played an Elvish tribe, so there was a group but normally there is lots of conflict within the group, because there are different people with different cultural background and looks on the world that can easily collide and lead to arguments or even duells all the way throug the adventure. You dont need an alignment that says what you think about the world, the law or stuff.

I don't speak German, so I'm taking for granted that every module is a railroad, however, I also keep hearing the term "highly detailed". If the modules are extremely detailed with maps, town and npc info, etc, then can't you just use those as great setting for a sandbox and forget the plot of the modules?

Most people who play TDE play the setting no question about that. You can make your own campaigns and adventures in this setting. If you wanna use the plot you also can choose a timeline in which you adventures are playing. In my TDE-Group(s) we play in 2 different timelines so we have a different aventuria because in one timeline things didnt happen that happend in the other timeline.

When i started playing TDE i dont care for any metaplot or timeline or such things. But later on i started to like it.
You dont have to follow this metaplot like a slave and if you dont like the whole Aventuria Scenario you can also play in Myranor (another continent on the TDE Planet Dere) there is no Metaplot or stuff like this, but it is less detailed.

Quote from: Settembrini;602329I fear it is a little bit more depressing. I nowadays think it rapidly co-evolved with the true feelings & tastes of the audience...

EDIT: But there was hijacking, and it is a problem for the core audience itself, as fresh blood is hard to come by...more on that later

Looking forward to hear the why of it.

RPGPundit

Some more words on the why:

DSA was developed by Alpers, Fuchs and Kiesow. Fuchs and Alpers were SciFi and Fantasy fans. Actually they were relatively professional working in publishing for Sci Fi mostly. Kiesow was a basically failed art teacher.
After translating Tunnels & Trolls and D&D, the three joined up to come up with their own system and world in short notice, because the D&D license was too expensive for some publishing house that wanted to jump onto the rpg bandwagon of 1984.
So they did that and met wild success. Due to numerous developments Kiesow, the man who had nothing else but DSA, made it more and more HIS world. Fuchs and Alpers, after all, had the whole business of their own shop and publishing house (FANPRO) as well as editorial gigs at large publishers to care about. So late in the life of first edition, Kiesows vision of a hippy romanticist world deeply filled with "ambiance" and the correct mood came to the forefront. While HIS humour was supposedly okay to be injected in the gameworld, he became more and more obsessed with controlling all aspects of the game world. Fuchs and Alpers did basically stop contributing from 2nd Edition onward. Kiesow could not do it all himself, so he gathered more failed and crazy people who could help him: Thomas Römer and Hadmar, alleged Baron of Wieser (and nowadays trying to sell Satanic enlightenment experiences and his old DSA notes on a CD). These guys were full control freaks too, but submissive enough to form the strong core of the DSA-principle: "You obey the writers and the players will bow to your will as you did to the writers". The elaborate metaplot was divvied up among sequential modules. So at a point, you had more something like dime novels with continuity instead of modules. Calling them modules at this point in time might even be wrong...
For the DM, there were things hidden and hinted at in the modules...a DM can actively "play" DSA, with the writers being the meta-DM. For the players there was...whatever it is...a scenic ride, I guess.

Hmm. Fascinating.

Anyone care to offer rebuttal?

RPGPundit

One of the peculiarities of Kiesow-DSA that cannot be stressed enough is that the module-writers prescribe or aim for emotions. That is, good GMing is defined as the ability to generate the wanted emotions in the players at a specific time.

ADD: And most German players seem to like that and think it is the whole point of RPGs.

Stated in such general terms, I don't see what's wrong with that. Certainly I play RPGs to have fun (to feel a specific emotion), not to tell stories, develop themes etc. and expect a good GM to help me having fun.

What do they mean exactly?

Ok Settembrini, i get where you coming from. You dont like the way some people play DSA(TDE) and you don't like the Metaplot.

First of all, Ulrich Kisow died in 1997, so his influence on the fourth edition of TDE is rather small and honestly i dont really cared for TDE before the actuall edition, because the ultimate Hero thing and doing adventures without a real reason wasn't for me. The points i dont liked vanished due to the actual edition.

Your second point of mislike is the metaplot, which in your opinion makes the GM a slave of the editorial staff of TDE. The Metaplot is one of the features TDE offers, that is meant to create a simulated fantasy world in which you can play. But if you dont like it, you can ignore it. There is no TDE Police that will get you. The main reason people use the Metaplot, is because they consider it a great thing. (Parts of the Metaplot are created by the community through something called Mail-Game.)

In TDE you have a changing "simulated" fantasy world and lots of adventures. Some of these let the players be a part of the actual history like "The 7 marked"(Die 7 Gezeichneten), "The year of the Griffin"(Das Jahr des Greifen) or "The Phileasson Saga" other campaigns let you influence a specific region in the world "Of their own graces"(Von eigenen Gnaden) where you Manage a Barony. That means for the GM and his Group, that he can use a pretty preset scenario in a simulated world and focus on setting the scene in this scenario(Trying to make it frightening or jolly or picturesque) and his group is free to focus on the roleplaying of their charakter. Its a little bit, like in a theatre.

In conclusion you could say that TDE differs in its way to adress roleplaying from games like D&D, but it still can be pretty awesome if you like it. Only because its not for you doesnt make it a bad game.

Quote from: MatteoN;603041Stated in such general terms, I don't see what's wrong with that. Certainly I play RPGs to have fun (to feel a specific emotion), not to tell stories, develop themes etc. and expect a good GM to help me having fun.

What do they mean exactly?

Specific emotions at specific points in the pre-plotted adventure. So it is the creepy-mystery swamp, everybody must feel creeped and mysterious.
You meet a poor miner's daughter, everybody must feel sympathy. Etc. ad nauseam.

Quote from: Nebelherr;603060In conclusion you could say that TDE differs in its way to adress roleplaying from games like D&D, but it still can be pretty awesome if you like it. Only because its not for you doesnt make it a bad game.

You are right, it is not because I do not like it does it become a bad game.
it is objectively bad in several ways, but lets assume it is not.

I grant DSA its sucess it is good at what Kiesow wanted to do, and if you like that, it works pretty good and is relatively unique experience.
Trouble is, the longing for that unique experience is evil. Just like the Wandervogel, nobody says Wandervogel people did not have fun. they did, and it was evil.

ADD: 4th DSA is rules-wise a bad game, because it cannot accomplish a single design goal of 4th edition, neither ambiance, balance, speed of play, simulation, tactics, storytelling...the rules are always in the way, whatever you do. And it is evil to begin with.

I wonder how much of this is chicken-and-egg.

The playstyle of TDE fell on very fertile ground while the alternatives (eg, AD&D, sandbox play, RQ, Harnmaster, Midgard) had a very hard time.
There was no rejection, or even criticism, of "camp fire romanticism".
It's the TDE players that actively reject any notion of dungeon-style play (whatever that might be).

Even German Cthulhu adopted the TDE philosophy (thanks to some overlap of authors/translators).

I agree to some degree. Most DSA-fans like it the way it is. Percentage-wise, Germany has much fewer roleplayers than say, America or Britain.

I blame the early dominant role of a dognmatic and exclusive playstyle.
It is very, very early that DSA writings become preachy, fighting ghosts of D&D that 99,9% of the audience did not even know.
DSA, right from the start, DIFFERENTIATES itself from "other RPGs = D&D". It is actvely indocrinating, and propagandizing against an enemy that did not exist.
In a way, DSA's culture was relatively "coherent" in Forger terms by 1988. And then the dwindling of the player base started. Don't know if it ever stabilized, others will know more. It got sold several times now, that much I know.

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;603100I wonder how much of this is chicken-and-egg.

The playstyle of TDE fell on very fertile ground while the alternatives (eg, AD&D, sandbox play, RQ, Harnmaster, Midgard) had a very hard time.
There was no rejection, or even criticism, of "camp fire romanticism".
It's the TDE players that actively reject any notion of dungeon-style play (whatever that might be).

Even German Cthulhu adopted the TDE philosophy (thanks to some overlap of authors/translators).

Coming from the Midgard angle i can corroborate this hypothesis. Nearly every Con game, especially the Midgard Con games, i participated from the mid-eighties to the early nineties had this camp fire vibe.
This is kind of strange because the Midgard setting while being a bland conglomeration of historical cultures is virtually metaplot free, and the official adventures were mostly dungeon crawls.
So this let me tell you a story style of play wasn't supported by the authors at all.

Midgard I know too few things about. It does have its own unique power base in southern Germany were similiar things are slightly different so it is impossible for me to judge. I know some hardcore Midgardians, and have played with P. Kathe, but the Midgard riddle never really opened its secrets for me...I once categorized it as "Fantasy National Geographic", but as mentioned above, Midgard in many cases is its own thing, and North German Midgard is different from the Southern one close to its womb.

Don't know if it ever stabilized, others will know more. It got sold several times now, that much I know.

As a matter of fact, it has. During the last years they even had problems to match the demand, like you can see here:
http://archiv.ulisses-spiele.de/blog/2010/09/ausverkaufte-dsa-abenteuer-nachdrucke-pdfs-der-mythos-um-auflagengrosen-und-verkaufszahlen/

The blog-entry is about the problem of ulisses with the short period until an adventure is sold out because of growing demand. Obviously TDE has no trouble with a dwindling fan-base anymore.

4th DSA is rules-wise a bad game, because it cannot accomplish a single design goal of 4th edition, neither ambiance, balance, speed of play, simulation, tactics, storytelling...the rules are always in the way, whatever you do. And it is evil to begin with.

First of all, TDE(DSA) is not evil, its a roleplaying game and not the NSDAP. Secondly i cant see why the rules are always in the way of anything. You have a lot of rules, its true, but a lot of them are optional or expert rules, so you dont have to apply them but you can if you want. I dont have a problem with the ambience, balance, the speed of play, simulation, tactics of storytelling. Cant see your point. It seems to me mor like personal dislike.

There was no rejection, or even criticism, of "camp fire romanticism".
It's the TDE players that actively reject any notion of dungeon-style play (whatever that might be).
The dungeon-style play means, that you crawl through a dungon for days and days, sleeping there living there. Especially the "sleeping in the Dungon" part seemed rather odd to me. Thats why i actually only once had a small dungon when i was GM for a D&D 3.5 campaign.
We normally had lots and lots of dungeon, but i disliked it for different reasons.