Reading a rogues' gallery of Ravenloft villains is a great old time. You've got fresh, fun spins on all kinds of classic horror monsters, most of whom admittedly already existed in D&D, but in interesting and iconic new forms that deemphasize hack and slash combat and reemphasize their personal stories and horrible not-quite tragedies. Oh, even there there're warning signs; sometimes a designer clearly didn't get the memo that a Darklord is supposed to be miserable rather than enjoying themself.
And then you try to play it and you realize that large portions of it weren't designed with players in mind. Whether it's the inconsistent way the Mists work within the Demiplane of Dread as a whole (because the writers want to have their cake of interactions and political intrigues between Darklords, but also want to pick the party up and throw them about without warning and/or give the Darklords the ability to trap them with ease), or the fact that vast swathes of player concepts either flat-out don't work or are more trouble than they're worth, especially given many Ravenloft campaigns are supposed to sneakily pretend to be something else at first (if you're planning to play a necromancer, summoning archetype, or any kind of non-human race, spare yourself the headache and don't), or that an awful lot of "classic" Ravenloft ideas are seen as too central to the setting to purge but obviously work on paper and fail on the table, casualties of the "no playtesting" rules.
None of which even touches the extent to which official adventures were trash, riddled with the sorts of poorly-designed scripted encounters no one in the modern day defends. And horror games by necessity require a bit of buy-in on the table's part; one arrogant try-hard who wants to out-optimize anything in the manual can ruin the delicate and fragile atmosphere necessary to create proper tone.
Yet, calls for a Ravenloft revival or conversion never really die or go away across editions, and it's one of the bigger settings that isn't traditional heroic fantasy. I think people are right to love the idea of D&D by way of Universal or Hammer Horror, even if it needs work.
If someone in your circle wants to play a Ravenloft game, and they aren't just an old-timer who sees clunky rules as a badge of honor rather than a problem, you can get pretty far on slow-burn atmosphere. Let them gradually realize just how wrong thing're going, or have to piece together what's wrong in this neck of the world, ideally over multiple sessions. I also recommend homebrewing your own Darklords, just so that one guy familiar with the setting can have the fun of discovery with everyone else and isn't tempted to cheat and metagame. And unless someone in your group is actively doing heinous things, just leave Powers Checks in the past where they belong... though if they are, then feel free to lure them down the road to damnation.
Evergreen premise, mixed execution, somewhat difficult to turn into an actual campaign
Reading a rogues' gallery of Ravenloft villains is a great old time. You've got fresh, fun spins on all kinds of classic horror monsters, most of whom admittedly already existed in D&D, but in interesting and iconic new forms that deemphasize hack and slash combat and reemphasize their personal stories and horrible not-quite tragedies. Oh, even there there're warning signs; sometimes a designer clearly didn't get the memo that a Darklord is supposed to be miserable rather than enjoying themself.
And then you try to play it and you realize that large portions of it weren't designed with players in mind. Whether it's the inconsistent way the Mists work within the Demiplane of Dread as a whole (because the writers want to have their cake of interactions and political intrigues between Darklords, but also want to pick the party up and throw them about without warning and/or give the Darklords the ability to trap them with ease), or the fact that vast swathes of player concepts either flat-out don't work or are more trouble than they're worth, especially given many Ravenloft campaigns are supposed to sneakily pretend to be something else at first (if you're planning to play a necromancer, summoning archetype, or any kind of non-human race, spare yourself the headache and don't), or that an awful lot of "classic" Ravenloft ideas are seen as too central to the setting to purge but obviously work on paper and fail on the table, casualties of the "no playtesting" rules.
None of which even touches the extent to which official adventures were trash, riddled with the sorts of poorly-designed scripted encounters no one in the modern day defends. And horror games by necessity require a bit of buy-in on the table's part; one arrogant try-hard who wants to out-optimize anything in the manual can ruin the delicate and fragile atmosphere necessary to create proper tone.
Yet, calls for a Ravenloft revival or conversion never really die or go away across editions, and it's one of the bigger settings that isn't traditional heroic fantasy. I think people are right to love the idea of D&D by way of Universal or Hammer Horror, even if it needs work.
If someone in your circle wants to play a Ravenloft game, and they aren't just an old-timer who sees clunky rules as a badge of honor rather than a problem, you can get pretty far on slow-burn atmosphere. Let them gradually realize just how wrong thing're going, or have to piece together what's wrong in this neck of the world, ideally over multiple sessions. I also recommend homebrewing your own Darklords, just so that one guy familiar with the setting can have the fun of discovery with everyone else and isn't tempted to cheat and metagame. And unless someone in your group is actively doing heinous things, just leave Powers Checks in the past where they belong... though if they are, then feel free to lure them down the road to damnation.