Re: What difficultly level do you play one?

On Sat, 13 Jul 2024 11:43:46 -0400, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

On Sat, 13 Jul 2024 09:45:12 +0100, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:
>

On 11/07/2024 16:23, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

On Thu, 11 Jul 2024 09:31:05 +0100, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:
 

On 10/07/2024 12:22, Zaghadka wrote:

On Wed, 10 Jul 2024 09:28:12 +0100, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action, JAB
wrote:
>

Another one of my pet peeves, monsters that just inhabit rooms waiting
to be killed by some passing adventurers. Do they never eat, sleep, work?

>
Ah, the Gygax approach. Yeah, that's why 2e introduced this whole novel
concept called "ecology." That and the idea that creatures - that should
be mortal enemies - are just hanging out in one room, never leaving,
while the other group they hate hangs out in another is silliness.
>

>
That chimes with my experience of playing AD&D 'back in the day'. We
used to run pre-written modules mixed with homebrew ones and naturally
the 'formula' of the former was the basis for the latter. Get to
dungeon, kill everything and grab the loot. We even had a DM that
dispensed with all the faff of finding the dungeon and just placed you
at the entrance.

 
 
In fairness, while the conceit of the dungeon-crawl was fairly basic
in the day, even the early modules had the expectation of a more
robust and reactive world. But the modules were rarely written with
that intention stated outright, almost never giving out specific
alternatives and details on what to do should the players stray from
the expected path. It was left unsaid, and so many DMs -sticking to
the text- played the game exactly as written, which led to a lot of
very static dungeons where you COULD rest at will, with enemy NPCs
(who were little more than hit-points and stat-blocks) that cheerfully
remained cloistered in their assigned rooms until the players stumbled
upon them.
 

[snip]

The TL;DR is that while a lot of D&D modules come across as fairly
uninspired dungeon-crawls (and undeniably that is how most of them
actually /were/ played), I don't get the impression that's how the
writers EXPECTED them to be played.
 

>
Is that's really what they thought I haven't seen any real evidence of
it and they did an awful job of saying that's how the game was supposed
to be played which is what I would have expected at least somewhere.

>
I don't disagree with that. ;-)
>

There really is almost nothing in the official written material that
pushed forward that's how the game was supposed to be played.

>
A few hints are scatted in the official rulebooks that the world
should be reactive (DMG 1E p104, for instance) but I agree, actual
recommendations on the matter were fairly scarce. Then again, actual
advice on how to play the game /in general/ wasn't that common either;
almost the entire focus of those original rulebooks was on
dice-rolling rather than the more ephermeral roleplaying. Still, There
was a lot of stuff written in The Dragon Magazine with suggestions
along these lines, although how 'official' you may consider that is up
to debate. But if you read on how Gygax played his own campaigns, you
do see that he didn't run adventures where everything was static and
dependent on player actions.
>

Here I'll weigh in. The fact that the entire Bard class even exists tells
anyone that there is a persistent, reactive universe at the center of the
game. There are henchmen rules, stronghold rules, an entire section -
though not fleshed out - on extraplanar adventures, and expectations that
higher level characters will have bases (aforementioned "strongholds")
and political affiliations and much larger responsibilities in their
world. There are rules for consulting sages, etc. There's the "Legend
Lore" spell. It's all there.

But it's all very poorly organized and edited and it took a genius game
master to read the DMs guide, absorb that behemoth, chaotic tome, and
integrate the total mess of copy-paste. It read like a scrapbook.

That's why 2e went the other way round and made the PHB big, and DMs
guide small. It is actually edited material. Because one player, the game
master, should not be responsible for that much stuff. The group of
players, the PCs, is much more able to handle it as a team.

Again, we owe that to Gygax. His style was that the DM should know every
detail and control secret information about the basic mechanics of the
game, and he was quite capable of it. Part of the 1e experience is new
players were often surprised by the rules, rather than knowing them. But
DMs, all of them, got burned out by that approach.

The tradition of a monster mosaic dungeon without a campaign is largely
the reaction of 10-year-olds to a module like The Keep on The Borderlands
(B2) which came with the Basic Set. But full campaigns at the time also
used "traditional dungeon crawls." It's a time-honored tradition mirrored
in the Wizardry and Bard's Tale series. That the Gold Box games largely
broke free of this was impressive at the time, and Pool of Radiance
(which even had an overland map!) sold like hotcakes because of it. They
took the grid-based play to open areas like Valhingen graveyard and put
Wizardry to shame.

But kids' marketing sucked. Look at the D&D cartoon series. You meet both
Tiamat and Lloth in the first season. Tiamat shows up in the first
episode! The way it was marketed to children affected a generation of
players. Those players only sometimes matured out of that sort of game.

The point is, the adults who played the game in the 70s were aware, but
the Stranger Things crowd of the 80s was busy facing Demogorgon for no
particular reason. And they didn't, obviously, run in the same social
circles (I did, see below). That demogorgon crowd grew up, replaced the
MENSA crowd, and are as responsible for the collapse of the game, and
almost TSR, in the late 80s early 90s as Gygax was. Gygax catches too
much of the blame for this generation of stunted players and their effect
on the game.

That lack of clear language was a result of a blindness on the part of
Gygax and TSR; a failure to see that such obvious (to them)
instruction was required. They slowly started adding in clearer
instructions piecemeal, scattered across various books (the
Dungeoneers / Wilderness Survival Guides, Dungeon Masters Design Kit,
and with examples with later 1st Ed adventure modules and campaign
settings where there was more focus on how NPCs and monsters would
react to player actions. But it wasn't until 2nd Edition that TSR
would formalize the idea, in books like DMGR1 Campaign & Catacomb
Guide and DMGR5 Creative Campaigning, which were purposefully written
to aid DMs in creating more robust campaigns and pulling the game out
of the dungeon-crawl.
>

Yup. It was written as a loose set of rules for adults, who knew other
adults that played. That it took off with kids was an accident, and that
was not the aim of the 1e books. It wasn't even the aim of the 2e books.
It took a very intelligent 12-year-old to understand. But the first
books? I was learning words like "lucubration" for the first time and had
to go at it with a dictionary.

For Tomb of Horrors my understanding is that it was a Gygax 'special'
designed for tournament play and to really tax the players brains.
>

Tomb of Horrors is a grudge module. Gygax said so himself. There is
nothing ironic or brain challenging about it at all. It is simply unfair.
He just wanted to hand smug manchildren their asses at a convention. It
should never have been published, except that it is the seminal puzzle
dungeon, which is one of my favorite kinds of adventures.

I ran in adult social circles as a 10-12 year old because of a Boy Scout
leader who was a GM. I played with adults. There was one of those
jackholes at every table who poured their entire self-worth into a piece
of paper with stats on it. People bring their own ideas to Tomb of
Horrors to justify it as something better than it was, IMO.

--
Zag

No one ever said on their deathbed, 'Gee, I wish I had
spent more time alone with my computer.' ~Dan(i) Bunten