dathon wrote:

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.

Making maps of empty rooms is the easy part, filling them is the hard part.  80% of the maps had no content provided in the product, even though the blurb on the back of the box described it as a complete product.  And it's even more difficult to fill a map of empty rooms that someone else draws up than if I did it myself.  I knew what I was trying to do when I draw up a map, but I haven't a clue what the original mapmaker was thinking when he puts rooms all over the place.  And Undermountain is actually not an easy dungeon to fill, and have it make some sense.  There's not much rhyme and reason to the place's raison d'etre, except that Halaster is mad and just keeps filling up the rooms after adventurers come through.  One of the reasons I bought the produce in the first place (besides to collect it) was to find out how the designers would pull off such a massive dungeon and have it make some sense.  But, instead, they dodged the whole issue by leaving 80% of it empty.  Uh, guys, I just plunked down $20, please give me a complete product as you described it on the back of the box, thanks.  As for the monsters and magic items, there are plenty of other products to find those, but a truly massive and fabled dungeon that is fleshed out... well, there are not many of those.  The 20% of the rooms that were fleshed out looked interesting; it's too bad TSR dropped the ball and didn't flesh out the rest (or at least 50% of it anyway, geez...).  The first Undermountain box set is the worst D&D module ever in the sense that it was woefully underdeveloped and incomplete.  Even something as bad as Gargoyle could at least be run, even though it would still suck.  

My two coppers...

I can actually fill up ten posts with examples of $20 (not to mention $25, $30, $40 and $50) products that cannot be used, but truthfully ROM was not one of them.  I found placing my own encounters...hell, my own entire adventures....within the framework of the dungeon challenging.  I created my own backstory (Halaster was a legend that didn't exist, and the true purpose of the dungeon was even more sinister...). The idea of a 1000+ room dungeon being placid enough to place 1000's of set encounters is ludicrous...such a structure would be more fluid, with small power bases, random type encounters, and targets of opportunity (roving bands of deadly creatures).  I think you missed the entire point of the product, but I've always been surpised (even sometimes shocked) by DM's who run prepackaged modules absolutely exactly as written, with not even an iota of imagination or ingenuity involved.  Which is why there are tons of crappy DMs out there, myself not being one luckily.   I mean, technically, S2 White Plume Mountain give the characters involved one of the most overpowered and campaign wrecking magic items ever devised...and so most of my contemporaries had their campaigns immediately wrecked after they ran the module and characters decided to keep Stormbringer....err, Blackrazor I mean...for themselves.  Many of them just shook their heads with glum resignation as they told me the story.  They were so locked into running the adventure as written they allowed it to destroy whatever campaign they had running..when the solution was as simple as having the item work differently than written, or having it stolen from the PCs almost immediately by a more powerful being, or having it corrupt and destroy the wielder after a short period of time...in short, something anyone with imagination and vision would have come up with.  

    As relating to ROM, I guess I like a basic structure, plotline or locale with some specific encounters, characters or the like, and I enjoy working up the rest myself.  Then again, I have quite an imagination, and have been told by almost everyone I've DMed the last 25 years that I'm the best DM they have ever had.  If I could turn the worst D&D module ever into a three and a half year campaign for 7 players and 17 adventuring characters, then I guess I'll accept my gold medal....damn, I have got to start charging these guys for my services any day now.  

  BTW, if you wanted a superdungeon fleshed out entirely room by room, there was always WGR1 Greyhawk Ruins.  Now, THAT was a piece of shit, and a good example of why what you wanted doesn't work.



Mike B.

Second Edition AD&D.



Not because its bad per se: if you gave me amnesia and showed me both AD&D ruels I might even prefer 2E to 1E.



No, what sucks so much is the sheer cheek of T$R trying to make you spend vasts amounts on a "new" game which was in fact 99% the same as the old one.

nn wrote:Second Edition AD&D.



Not because its bad per se: if you gave me amnesia and showed me both AD&D ruels I might even prefer 2E to 1E.



No, what sucks so much is the sheer cheek of T$R trying to make you spend vasts amounts on a "new" game which was in fact 99% the same as the old one.

In contrast to 3rd Edition and 3.5 Edition D&D, which tried to make you spend vast amounts of money on a game that was entirely different than the one they had you spending money on the first 25+ years of their existence.



Mike B.

Badmike wrote:Well, we can agree to disagree on this one I guess. Maybe you are partially right, in no way was ROM a "Open the box and play" type adventure...I think it did require at least a bit of preparation, and was definitely not for a beginning DM or for someone willing to at least work up a plausable back-story or campaign thread.  There was an element of preparation that had to be done, true.  And I know from times when I was swamped with work or school the last 20+ years you can't always do as much preparation as you would like.
   But cmon, there wasn't at least $20 worth of playability there?  I can name several different areas without even digging out the box....the Beholder slaving camp, the Dark Tentacles lair, the Yuan ti stronghold, The Stalking Sword evil adventuring group's lair, Lord Hund's tomb, the Black Viper's lair...that you could completely pull out of the product and use as  either a mini-adventure or as part of a larger complex.  

The stuff that was there was often quite good.  That was why it was so disappointing that they left the other 80% of the dungeon "empty."  
I was really curious to see how they would put together a massive dungeon crawl that would make some sense.  

Badmike wrote:But in defense, I've dug out the old Dragon Mountain boxed set, and reading it over, it would take hours and hours to also make that over into some kind of structure I (or anyone else as far as I can see) could run, and that's even more detailed than ROM.  

Every published adventure takes some preparation, but RoM was a ton since 80% of it was undeveloped.  At least Dragon Mountain was mostly fleshed out even though it would still need some reworking.  

Badmike wrote:I was very disappointed in WGR1 because rooms are often nothing more than lists of monsters and their stats, I guess I was expecting something different, like you were with ROM.  

The problem with both products in essence is that the designers at TSR decided to tackle huge dungeon complexes but would not have the pages necessary to fully flesh them out.  In RoM they did a good job on the 20% that they did but left the other 80% empty.  In WGR1 there were some good parts, but much of it suffered from not having enough pages to fully develop every nook and cranny.  It became the worst of the old JG products with monsters in almost every room but with no context except stats.  

Badmike wrote:And your point was well-taken about ROM working better as a product with more insight, years later I found a website where gamers were asked to leave complete descriptions of different room encounters that could be found on different levels of UM.  I think it ended up being several dozen rooms/encounters fully fleshed out.  Maybe if TSR had solicited from the public at large (though this was in the T$R days when merely posting what would be today considered a blog that mentioned D&D would lead to a legal challenge) they could have filled another 20%-30% percent of the rooms indicated and made for a more detailed product.

What you described of your version of RoM sounds much better than the product itself off the shelf.  Unfortunately, the rest of us didn't get Badmike's notes and development of RoM, but instead got a box set that was purported to be complete but still needed a lot of work.  A good DM can take any published adventure and spin gold from it with enough time, care and attention, even WG9 Gargoyle.  

Badmike wrote:BTW, curiously, did you ever look at the Ruins of Myth Drannor boxed set?  You must have REALLY hated that one...even less detailed than ROM and covering even more territory!!!!

I have it but never looked at it in any detail.  By that time the precedent had been set that FR box set adventures would usually be "incomplete."  RoMII was an exception to this, though the quality was nowhere near what was in the original RoM.  Another FR box set that really irked me was Menzoberranzan.  It was one of the first $30 box sets, and supposed to be a complete look at a Drow city, but it didn't even contain a map grid of this "small" Drow city.  I was expecting something along the lines of the City of Greyhawk box set with a big map of the city and all the most important establishments, businesses and city buildings labeled with descriptions, but instead I got a two paragraph excuse in one of the booklets that the designers were not going to do that because it would take up too much space.  Instead they provided me with a ton of narrative that I like to create myself.  

And I guess this is what it comes down to with published adventures in my case.  When I plunk down my money to use an adventure, I want the designers to take the grunt work out of DM-ing for me.  I'll provide the narrative and hook for the players, that's the fun part that can be tailored to each group of players and their characters.  That's why the classics like Keep on the Borderlands, Slavelords and Against the Giants are so great.  They provide the barebones framework and raison d'etre, and the DM fleshes it out and provides the narrative to make it a living, breathing and believable universe.  The designers should do the grunt work, and the DM should get to have fun with it.

N4. Did anyone actually enjoy N4?

Whoops. I meant N3. Now that was a stinking pile of cr*p. My group actually had someone walk away from the table out of sheer boredom when we played that one. Then they reprinted it for 2E. Whose bright marketing idea was that?

N4 wasn't bad - although it took some work on the part of the DM.

Speaking of useless products and boxed sets, is there any sane reason why TSR placed the entire D&D campaign series (Basic, Expert, Companion, Master and Immortals) in boxes? These were all just two slim booklets which could have all been combined into one really useful rulebook or boxed set, instead of having to pay $18 or so each for all five boxed sets. For god's sake, none of these even had a map inside!!!!

Good point. I always wondered that myself. Guess the box helped them to justify charging the prices they did...

Badmike wrote:Speaking of useless products and boxed sets, is there any sane reason why TSR placed the entire D&D campaign series (Basic, Expert, Companion, Master and Immortals) in boxes? These were all just two slim booklets which could have all been combined into one really useful rulebook or boxed set, instead of having to pay $18 or so each for all five boxed sets. For god's sake, none of these even had a map inside!!!!

Mike B.

The supposed idea was that as your characters achieved higher levels, you would go out and buy the additional rules.  Was there a real point to the boxes?  For Basic, I could see it, providing the box was large enough to store all the other books.  Everything else should have been shrinkwrapped on a backing board.

In terms of bad business blunders, nothing beats splitting the rules up into a player's book and GM's book.  In the Moldvay/Cook versions of the Basic and Expert books, all the rules were right there, easy to find.  In the later Mentzer printings, the rules in many cases were repeated between both books.  It just wasn't necessary to do that.

Of course, in 1991, all the rules (and few of the examples) from the first four sets were released as the D&D Rules Cyclopedia.  Immortals was heavily revised into the Wrath of the Immortals supplement.  But fewer people were playing D&D, instead pursuing AD&D.  In 1995, D&D got the axe, only to have the name borrowed by the pretender game, d20 Fantasy.

bbarsh wrote:The Rules Cyclopedia is actually my favorite version of any D&D/AD&D game with the exception of 1st edition.

If you have never read the book - and I don't think too many people have - take a look, you'll be interested. The mechanics are great, the rules are streamlined and remarkably sensible. I have always thought it was AD&D first edition - reduced calorie version!

Agreed, the Rules Cyclopedia was a nice piece of work and how TSR should have done it in the first place rather than the box sets.

darkseraphim wrote:Castles & Crusades, the new Gygaxian game, is going back to AD&D / Rules Cyclopedia basics, and the playtesters seem really excited about it.  You can follow the tester threads at ENworld and such.

I know I am, and I'm one of the inactive playtesters (got to see the rules, but had no real time to dissect them and actually play them).  The Trolls have done a fine job with this game so far, but there is still much more to go before the hardcovers are released.

>The supposed idea was that as your characters achieved higher levels, >you would go out and buy the additional rules. Was there a real point to >the boxes? For Basic, I could see it, providing the box was large >enough to store all the other books. Everything else should have been >shrinkwrapped on a backing board.

Well, one practical use of the Basic-Immortal set boxes was that you could store several extra modules (or maps or characters) in the box with the appropriate rule set...for example some of the CM modules in with the Companion set rules. I actually have my stuff stored away like this right now...cuts down on the amount of storage space required.

Of course, the boxes aren't the most sturdy of constructions...

My vote for most worthless module was XSOLO1 - Lathan's Gold.