One of my at-yet-unrealised ambitions is to finally run all of the original Dragonlance adventures using the system in which they were designed. That would be the AD&D system, and it happens to be a system I’m currently running a campaign with (it’s been going about 9-10 months), although I’ve dropped down to fortnightly sessions to allow some other campaigns (Rifts, Fantasy Hero) to run, and to allow me to play a few more board and card games.
One of the biggest problems with the Dragonlance settings to my mind is that, in the beginning, it was just a variant AD&D setting: you had kenders and draconians in it – and no orcs – but it basically used the AD&D rules.
This all changed with the release of the Dragonlance Adventures hardcover. DLA was basically TSR’s first attempt to change the baseline rules of AD&D to fit another setting, including new classes, races and mixing things up even more, and it looks really, really cool – but, unfortunately, ends up creating a world that actually doesn’t match what is going on in the novels or the original adventures. And then poisoned it for everything that came later.
DLA is also, in many ways, a preview of what would be going on with 2nd edition. Gary Gygax had included, in AD&D, “school” descriptors for the various spells, such as evocation. They didn’t really have much effect. However, DLA actually decided to list all the schools and then limit the different types of Wizards of High Sorcery to certain schools of spells. Instant differentiation! Except, it’s all sort of shit once you actually try to play those wizards. It also means that Raistlin couldn’t actually cast a lot of the spells he does in the books, because a Red-Robed Wizard can’t cast sleep (one of his signature spells in the novels).
The less said about the Knights of Solamnia the better, as they’re meant to have all the cavalier abilities on top of their actual abilities. Yikes! The cavalier was one of the more broken classes out of Unearthed Arcana, and the write-up of the Knights manages to leave out a few rather key details. Not so good.
One good feature of DLA was the gathering of all the Non-Weapon Proficiencies from the Wilderness and Dungeoneering Survival Guides into one table. Not that I had the WSG at the time – I finally bought it last year. I think.
The original adventures and novels set, for me, the baseline of what Dragonlance should be. Beyond that, I’m not as interested – although I did play in a short-lived 3E Dragonlance game, which I enjoyed. However, I really, really want to run through the original saga at some point. There are twelve scenarios in it, and they should take about 4 sessions each; if I could do this as a weekly game, that’d be about a year to complete the entire thing. Two years if I had to do it on a fortnightly basis.
I’m fascinated to see how the players of today react to the adventures. There’s a lot of scorn placed on the adventures today due to their railroading of players, but that’s standard practice in the industry today. Paizo has made their business based on the back of railroaded adventure paths; so it shouldn’t be an issue. Dragonlance doesn’t make the mistake that the Avatar trilogy did of making the NPCs more important than the heroes; no, in Dragonlance, it’s definitely the heroes that are at the front of the action.
The trick will be finding the players and the time. I’d say the optimal way of playing this would be using the original characters and a group-size of 6, with Flint and Tas being run by one player and Goldmoon and Riverwind by another. I wonder who would be interested?