This is what the 90s were like. A review of a D&D product, in D&D's own magazine, in which the reviewer summarizes how CHILDISH the idea of a dungeon crawl was. From 1996. Ask an AD&D® game veteran about dungeon crawls, and he’ll probably dis-miss them as the role-playing equivalent of training wheels, useful for teaching the fundamentals, but best set-aside when you’re ready to join the grown-ups. What mature role-player, after all, wants to wander around a labyrinth cre-ated by somebody with the architectural acumen of a pre-schooler? Who wants to run a gauntlet of two-dimensional adversaries whose only purpose in life is to guard the rooms they happen to occupy?
pic.twitter.com/CBlcJwblPl— Matt Colville? (@mattcolville) August 14, 2021
What’s also funny to me is that there’s this growing consensus that 5E is GOOD for dungeon crawls and the reason folks chafe at its limitations is because they’re trying to use it for anything BUT.
(I have no opinion here, this may well be true for all I know). There's a million ways to play D&D, you don't need to run dungeons. You can ignore them, or embrace them.
It's this bullshit attitude that playing D&D was CHILDISH and real "mature" gamers played "storytelling games" that made me want to headbutt my cat.
— Matt Colville? (@mattcolville) August 14, 2021
This is bizarre to me. What other options were there in the 90s (I’m a 93 kid) Today, if someone told me they’d ‘matured’ beyond dungeons, I’d say “I guess DUNGEONS and Dragons might not be your game anymore.” Oh shit there were a TON of options. The sheer number of RPGs coming out every month in the 90s was crazy.
TSR alone put out a ton of WORLDS in the 90s, to give folks places to go that were more about STORY than killing goblins.
— Matt Colville? (@mattcolville) August 14, 2021