bbarsh wrote:...DragonLance WAS the beginning of the end. 16 modules of crap...Side note: I personally liked Hollow World - the modules were kinda crappy, but the overall concept was very playable.
johnhuck wrote:Didn't think I'd find a fellow DL-hater. I remember playing DL1. We all thought it was a BoS. But we persevered with DL2. Then halfway though DL3 we just decided to give up through boredom.
bbarsh wrote:...lame storyline...vommit-inducing...nothing compelling...Everyone gets feathers...gonna get sick...
red_dawn wrote:They did a LOT better when they didn't have $$. It forced them to put out good products in order to be able to sell them. Same as any other company.Uh-huh. There might be some fuzzy nostalgia there. Before Dragonlance, what was TSR putting out? Some of the modules were quite good for their time (A1-4 series, GDQ come to mind) but way too many were just glorified treasure zoos. While I could write pages on the weaknesses of Dragonlance, one aspect it really pioneered for TSR was the cohesive campaign world. A storyline, with linked events; it's much like comparing episodic nothing-ever-changes-old-Star-Trek to... Babylon 5 or Firefly, where what happens before matters later in the story. Many individual DMs of course built cohesiveness into their campaigns from the beginning, but they got little help from TSR in this regard. Personally, I wish the Gygax/TSR feud hadn't doomed Greyhawk. I would have preferred that the attention had gone there instead of DL or Forgotten Realms.And yes, while its chic to say that money doesn't matter, small is beautiful, blah, blah... The fact is that if a company is going to make an impact in its field, it needs capital. Wishing otherwise doesn't make it so. Look at Palladium, SPI's DragonQuest, or Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying... each excellent game systems in their own way, but doomed to obscurity through undercapitalization.
dathon wrote:Part of the "appeal" of the compendiums was that you could buy new sets and then combine them... except you really couldn't since you wouldn't be able to alphabetize them properly with monsters in each set printed on both the back and front sheets. Worst D&D "whatever" of all time is probably the movie. Worst D&D adventure of all time would be the Ruins of Undermountain box set. A bunch of maps with very little description of the contents of all those rooms. Basically the DM spends a chunk of money and then has to spend hours upon hours attempting to flesh out some TSR cartographer's map of rooms. Advertising it as a complete mega-dungeon adventure was pretty close to false advertising.
Ralf Toth wrote:red_dawn wrote:They did a LOT better when they didn't have $$. It forced them to put out good products in order to be able to sell them. Same as any other company.Uh-huh. There might be some fuzzy nostalgia there. Before Dragonlance, what was TSR putting out? Some of the modules were quite good for their time (A1-4 series, GDQ come to mind) but way too many were just glorified treasure zoos. .
red_dawn wrote:They did a LOT better when they didn't have $$. It forced them to put out good products in order to be able to sell them. Same as any other company.Uh-huh. There might be some fuzzy nostalgia there. Before Dragonlance, what was TSR putting out? Some of the modules were quite good for their time (A1-4 series, GDQ come to mind) but way too many were just glorified treasure zoos. .
Badmike wrote: Actually, I'd rate Ruins of Undermountain one of the best RPG products ever released by not just TSR, but any company. Different strokes I suppose. I mean cmon, it was four gigantic maps of three levels of a superdungeon with dozens of the rooms detailed plus plenty of room to place your own encounters. Not to mention pages and pages of supporting material, treasure cards, new monsters, campaign and adventure hooks, entire adventures, very detailed areas, etc. I'd rather have lots of blank areas where you can develop your own ideas than pages and pages of monster listings...besides, I like to personalize anything I run almost to the point if a player bought the same item he would be clueless to what follows. With just this boxed set, FR1 Waterdeep and the North accessory, and the Volo's Guide to WD plus many of my own materials, I ran a 3 and a half year campaign adventuring every week or so where the party only left the environs of the city/UM dungeon one time (twice, if you count the time they accidentally took a gate to a lich-haunted castle on a distant island....and hastily jumped back through the gate after getting their ass kicked). By far the most fun and interesting campaign I've ever run.... My vote for worst products goes with the useless 2 volume Magic Encyclopedias and the geek a rama AD&D player plastic suitcases (both covered in depth by another poster)Mike B.
