Question for old school players · Game Master's Laboratory

Question for old school players

I have a question for those of you who played BECMI1e/2e D&D. The game has undergone some significant changes over the years. Personally I see them as positive as it has a much stronger emphasis on group story telling. While I really enjoy this aspect, I have found there's an incentive for every character to have some tragic/epic back story and for every story to have a fate-of-the-world-hangs-in-the-balance feel.

So here is my question. Does anyone miss just a good old fashioned dungeon crawls where the stakes are just the lives of the PCs and the monsters in the dungeon and where modules could be played in 2 or 3 sessions (they were only about 30 pages long) and were truly modular. Modules today are anything but. Getting ready to run my own campaign now is so much more work than it used to be.

As this question relates to proactive Roleplaying, it seems to me the modular approach to published materials from the 80s is more amenable to this style of play because the story arcs are much shorter. You can jump from one module to another tweaked for your characters goals. Has anyone run proactive Roleplaying in large published modules currently available and also run the smaller modules? Was there any appreciable difference?

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