Damn D&D fell off way sooner than it really looks. The module writing shows that they forgot how to do game design in the 2e days. It goes from describing a fortress of evil in detail, the bad guys power and goals, and trusting the GM to run a game to encounters with fixed endings and more read aloud text than setup. The page counts inflated for less content.
The format of a good adventure is like a sandbox, you scatter interesting, hopefully interlocked things in it, give players a goal, and let them find out how to achieve it. This is the format of an adventure or mystery RPG. A storygame, or forgeshit as i like to call them, needs no format because you're just fucking around with dice and tokens. 2e goes full read: the format becomes "first x happens then y happens then z happens." As an example this Ravenloft module I'm reading has DAY ONE: read aloud text and a gypsy encounter that can only end one way no matter what, NIGHT ONE: read aloud text and a tarot reading that can only go one way, rinse and repeat and if you're lucky an NPC may or may not die. For six in game days.
And I've heard people say 2e had the besr settings of the D&D editions. Thats clearly not true. It has the best settings out of D&D wikis. If you actually want to play, they suck. For the GM at least. The art is fine. You're lucky if you get new random encounter tables. At best they change very little about the Dnd loop of exploring and dungeon looting, because why would they? D&D is pure Greyhawk from the rules outward. If wizards and dragons work a certain way and want certain things and get them certain ways, a setting comes out of that which you can't change by switching into a dracula costume.
