I had a thought, and mind you, this could just be me thinking too hard about my autistic elfgames.
I’m gonna preface this by saying that there’s only one right way to play a tabletop rpg, and that’s, “Whatever works for you and your group.” I’m not out to diss anyone’s preference of game style.
That being said, I feel like there’s been a shift in tabletop games from when it first started to now. Instead of a sandbox game with a bunch of interesting locales, there’s generally a single story (or a series of stories) where the main characters shape what happens next. Nothing inherently wrong with either, mind (though I’ll admit to having never played an OSR game before). I’m just curious as to how that change came about.
In short, Player durability & societal changes as reflected through popular fiction & games. Game styles come in waves. Your perception is also a little warped, probably due to getting older.
In OD&D it was just expected you'd probably lose 2-3 characters in a crawl just due to bad rolls, and might party wipe in a completely unwinnable fight. It very often wasn't worth trying to get characters back (mechanics wise). 2e you had a good chance of a party wipe against the bad guy at the end, but better odds of making it past level 1. You might want to get your character back.
3.x made PCs much more durable, wizards very unlikely to get murked by a stray arrow.
This only got more more pronounced in 4e, and 5e has tons of resurrection options. PCs aren't supposed to stay dead, so you can build a narrative around them, feature their backstories, and get the player more involved.
This means the narrative has shifted to the PCs and away from the quest. The tale is not about how the dread necromaner Muerto was defeated, it is the adventures of Sir Fistsalot.
And what a majority of people want from their free time had changed, and changes more as they get older. They tend to want less hardcore brutal challenges and more "easy and fun" things.
The allowed narratives are shrinking. There is also a current frowning on 'exoticism'; "exploration is colonism and that is bad!" etc. The internet has made the world smaller.
Also your glasses are a little rose-colored. "Keep on the Borderlands" which I've heard called the most played D&D module in existance, tells the DM to straight up railroad the players and (via NPC) punish them if they attempt to solve the problem at the root of the conflict by not going on the adventure.
I noticed that too, and I think it in part correlates with the stigmatization of dungeoncrawling as something only beginners and grognards did, while "real roleplayers" did large-scale narratives.
Personally, I lean more towards dungeoncrawling fueled by the characters' own quests instead of some huge overarching plot. Maybe with a BBEG or their agents popping up every now and then. I just don't want to have to take/read a whole stack of notes just to keep track of what's going on, I already do enough data crunching at work.
There is a good bit of that too. People always talk about the wacky stories, not the dungeon grind, and everyone trying to emulate that.
I structure my naratives on Arabian Nights models: There should be a large over arching goal (war is loom!/Orcs are invading!/planets are aligning!) that drives the players forward. Along side that should be mid-sized quest (secure the region!/Find the lost children!/bring me
pictures of spiderman!) and inside that, smaller goals (Kill that guy! bring me that thing!) that should be completed in a session or two.
Have your player quests be the small session goals that support the quests and over arcing plot.
Example, in my current game the party have all come to the big plan of "Disrupt Orcus's plans in the region". Some have had prophetic dreams, another has been charged by their Bishop, one had beef with their family being sacrificed to orcus, another is a cult member who was raised in the cult but escaped etc. So the main thing they are working at is "Figure out what Orcus is up to and stop him".
Currently they are in a mountain town, based on information they found in other other areas. There is an Orcus cult that preys on travelers and caravans on the trade route near by. The party is working stop the cult while trying to uncover the leader's identity (who they will find is working in concert with the drow, leading to the next area)
And at the moment they are trying to clear a demonic shrine of Gnolls, having discovered the the Gnolls and the cult's leader have been working together. They've had a bunch of other small quests like finding a lost vault, negotiating with restless spirits... but all of those small things have generally been working towards solving the identity of the cult leader (or just being fun/profitable). So when the party feels lost in their sandbox, they have a guiding light "Find the cult leader" to keep them from being completely aimless.
