The Making of a 1980s Dungeons & Dragons Module

An anonymous reader writes: Over at Medium, Jon Peterson (author of Playing at the World) has put up a new in-depth article covering the internal process at TSR that created Dungeons & Dragons modules in the 1980s. The adventures created at that time (by the likes of Tracy Hickman, then a staff designer) paved the way for many later computer role-playing games, and this piece shows how TSR work was pitched, storyboarded, proofed, edited and organized. With the positive reception of the new 5th edition of D&D and the attention paid to the fortieth anniversary of the game, the historical record behind modern gaming gets ever more important.

Comments

It was a lot more social

[msobkow]

When we played, it was a far more social game than any of the electronic equivalents. A good dungeon master would let you try creative solutions for problems that weren't pre-programmed, sometimes throwing the game into entirely uncharted territory. More importantly, your team-mates were characters with personality, not just players with supporting stats.

How often does the thief in the party actually steal from team-mates in the electronic versions? Yet our team had a thief character who would do exactly that -- swipe anything that wasn't nailed down -- and sometimes use a crowbar if it was. :)