Quote from: Haffrung;8298302E was supported largely by wide-ranging, scripted campaigns. Exploring dungeons was regarded as anachronistic.

3E and 4E both focused on a return to the dungeon (a mistake in the case of 4E,  as the system is ill-suited to dungeoncrawling), but it was no longer the dungeon as an operational challenge, but the dungeon as a series of discrete encounters. Both editions included all kinds of advice and tools for crafting encounters - CL/EXP budgets, the features of the room, environmental effects, tactics. But the designers, and most of the players, had stopped thinking in terms of the dungeon as a design element in itself, and of exploration and overcoming challenges outside the set-piece encounter as worthwhile elements of the game.

Wholeheartedly agree with this. I felt like that was implied by the supporting materials.

Your commentary of 3/4E seems accurate--the dungeon is less of a holistic environment, and more of a series of linear, linked pieces (especially in the case of 4E, which I felt was something of a "mission-based" system). This, too, seems to be result of how the system is presented, same as 2E. Pretty sure some will assert you can dungeoncrawl with 4E just as easily as any of the others. I can't, because I didn't play it long enough to justify a comparison.

Quote from: Aos;829845Many people rejoiced at the release of 2e; hobos, felons and escaped mental patients had a game of their own, at last.

I thought that was Shadowrun.

JG

Amazing how many RPGers need the DMG to tell them how to play D&D the right way.  Wonder what they did before there was a DMG...sit in a room and roll up characters and then go home?

I think 2E is better written than 1E and would rather play or run it. However, if you already own 1E but don't own 2E, I don't see a reason you can't run the type of campaign you mentioned in your post with your 1E books.

Quote from: Matt;829872Amazing how many RPGers need the DMG to tell them how to play D&D the right way.  Wonder what they did before there was a DMG...sit in a room and roll up characters and then go home?

The issue is many of us were just GMing for the first time when 2E came out, so we had no point of reference or road map. A seasoned GM doesn't need the DMG to tell him or her what to do. Someone who has just started running adventures, needs some kind of advice there. I loved 2E, but the DMG was sorely lacking in that respect.

Even if you are running FG&G or M&M as 2e simulacrums (or even OSRIC), Its still worthwhile to pick up a copy of the 2e Monstrous Manual.  Its probably the best 2e book (along with the collected Spells/Magic Items/Van Richten Guides and the Complete Necromancer) and the best 2e core book.  The Simulacrums do not have the depth or breadth in monster selection.

The 2e MM was available for >$10 shipped on Fleabay in the past, not sure about prices now.  Note that the cloth binding in the book fails, but the stitched packets are very durable.  One can PVA/Elmer glue the entire block of the book to the spine if need be.

Quote from: Matt;829872Amazing how many RPGers need the DMG to tell them how to play D&D the right way.  Wonder what they did before there was a DMG...sit in a room and roll up characters and then go home?

I guess we've gotta ask OG about that...

It's interesting how only now (or in the last 3-4 years) there's a modest reappraisal of 2e. For a long time it was the edition that everyone agreed to ignore. Which was always stupid, as it's a perfectly functional edition.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;829782But I think the big thing with 2E was the setting material and flavor. For me it really worked and helped keep me inspired. I just had a lot of really good gaming in those years running Ravenloft. I had less fun running Ravenloft under 3E. I believed this to be simple nostalgia for some time (I figured I just had my best gaming years when I was young and had more time with my friends). But when I ran ravenloft using 2E several years back, it was the feel and tone I had remembered (but could never quite get with 3E).

I can see that, actually.  I'm reminded I played in a 3e Greyhawk game up until about 5th or 6th level (people were just starting to ask the GM about prestige classes), when the GM said **** it and went back to AD&D (1e in this case I think).  It was a fun game!  And I think not having every possible character concept open to players as a fully supported mechanical choice helps with world building and flavor.

Quote from: Matt;829872Amazing how many RPGers need the DMG to tell them how to play D&D the right way.  Wonder what they did before there was a DMG...sit in a room and roll up characters and then go home?

Book 3 of the original brown (later white) box D&D gave a lot of information about how to run the game (designing dungeons, running dungeons, running wilderness exploration). It may not have been written up in the user-friendly form that later gamers came to expect but the information was there -- the GM was not expected to already know it.

Quote from: Matt;829822Folks like the incoherent mess that is Gary Gygax's writing...leaves that much more open to interpretation!

It is not incoherent actually. Its just tons of data you might or might use at some point but might never. Which was the point. The organization is actually fairly straightforward. One topic tends to flow into another, building on what has been shown up till then.

Quote from: Matt;829872Amazing how many RPGers need the DMG to tell them how to play D&D the right way.  Wonder what they did before there was a DMG...sit in a room and roll up characters and then go home?

Nice try. But you failed miserably your spot check. Lets see, a 69: Roll every die within 30 feet for wandering damage.

What was said was that the DMG was useful for garnering ideas on HOW to DM when you know jack nothing at all. And it was useful for generating ideas on the fly when you are stumped or just want to do something totally random and roll with it.

Another thing the DMG does is it allows for simple dungeon and hex crawl solo and DM-less play.

Here is a starting area map generated using the 1e DMG

Quote from: Matt;829872Amazing how many RPGers need the DMG to tell them how to play D&D the right way.  Wonder what they did before there was a DMG...sit in a room and roll up characters and then go home?

I learned without a DMG. The Holmes basic book is incredibly evocative, but it's terrible at teaching you how to actually run (or even play) D&D. So I backwards engineered how to create a dungeon based on the sample dungeon in the book, and on B1 that came in the boxed set. Add the imagination of a 10-year-old and Bob's your uncle.

It does seem odd that people who learned from the 1E DMG should be upset that people who tried to learn from the 2E DMG might have had a tougher time. But expressing vicarious disappointment on behalf of others is a time-honoured tactic of edition warriors.

Quote from: Haffrung;830008I learned without a DMG. The Holmes basic book is incredibly evocative, but it's terrible at teaching you how to actually run (or even play) D&D. So I backwards engineered how to create a dungeon based on the sample dungeon in the book, and on B1 that came in the boxed set. Add the imagination of a 10-year-old and Bob's your uncle.

It does seem odd that people who learned from the 1E DMG should be upset that people who tried to learn from the 2E DMG might have had a tougher time. But expressing vicarious disappointment on behalf of others is a time-honoured tactic of edition warriors.

In practice what I saw was a lot of failed experiments from people the first few years of play. Eventually folks in my group cobbled together an understanding of how to run a game (pieced from various sources that included 1E material and the blue books). But I knew a guy who literally tried to map out every square inch of his campaign world in a way that was completely ungameable (and I mean every square inch). He just didn't know what to do and he misunderstood something one of the books seemed to be suggesting (the guy had stacks of maps but nothing to tie them together). He figured out the problem and found a way to run several long term successful campaigns. But those first few outings when people didn't know what they were doing were brutal sometimes.

Quote from: Haffrung;830008I learned without a DMG. The Holmes basic book is incredibly evocative, but it's terrible at teaching you how to actually run (or even play) D&D. So I backwards engineered how to create a dungeon based on the sample dungeon in the book, and on B1 that came in the boxed set. Add the imagination of a 10-year-old and Bob's your uncle.

It does seem odd that people who learned from the 1E DMG should be upset that people who tried to learn from the 2E DMG might have had a tougher time. But expressing vicarious disappointment on behalf of others is a time-honoured tactic of edition warriors.

Yeah, Holmes and the B/X books was where I first learned to DM. I played with just those as rulebooks for 3 years before getting the AD&D set. The 1E DMG had a ton of useful extra stuff, but nothing critical to designing and running adventures that I didn't already have from B/X.

There is seriously a LOT of awesome, how to create adventure stuff in Moldvay and in very few pages. I still think its the best bang for the page count of any single D&D rulebook.