A roleplayer frustrated at the structure of our society. She/her.
Given that almost no games other than D&D, Vampire (and perhaps other WoD games), and *maybe* Call of Cthulhu made it into general public awareness, and that indeed many people didn’t (and still don’t!) recognize that there is an actual category of analog games called “RPGs”, it’s not so weird in context.
I’ll note that the 90s is also when the fight over the term “RPG” between CRPGs and TTRPGs really started causing our hobby problems.
@Ziggurat When putting a settlement on a map that you don’t expect the party to go anywhere near soon, you only really need three pieces of info (beyond its location, anyway):
Name
Size (city/town/village)
Product (apples, silk, sheep, etc.) or service (government, knowledge, trade hub, etc.)
Why a product or service? It helps establish how trade happens, gives the town a reputation for the group to hear, gives you a hook from which to improvise NPCs from there, and so on.
It’s not that he replaced it, it’s that he built on it. The Reverse Three Clue Rule used in his node-based design articles (“if the players have at least three clues, they’ll draw at least one conclusion”) is a corollary, not a refutation of his previous advice.
The main way it’s changed since he wrote this article (and since he wrote his Node-Based Design series, for that matter) is that he distinguishes between clues and leads, which he didn’t at the time.
@Atlas48 First off, know from the outset whether you want to run a genuine mystery scenario, with an actual truth under the hood where the point is to overcome the challenge of finding that truth, or engage in mystery-*shaped* storytelling where the goal is to end up with a tale that resembles a mystery from the outside while not actually taxing the players’ brains. Advice varies wildly depending on which you’re doing.
Not everyone “in our hobby” is actually deep into it like us, nor do non-D&D games have multi-million-dollar marketing machines so people outside of the inner circle actually understand that these games exist. And remember, this was before it was common knowledge that EVERYTHING has a community online. They might well have honestly thought that if it’s not advertised, it doesn’t exist, and therefore their game was totally the first competition for D&D EVAR (when it absolutely wasn’t).