Yeah, I remember it both ways. Sometimes you'd click on a link at the bottom of one page to hit a dead end, but you could also go to the homepage of the webring itself and you could navigate through the sites in an iframe where you'd still run into a bunch of 404s, but you'd at least still have a "next" button in a separate frame so you could roll the dice again.

Webrings require maintenance to be useful and worth using, just like search engines do. The better maintained and curated they are, the more useful they will be.