Re: What difficultly level do you play one?

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.
It's was only when that group fell apart and we formed another one that I thought why not play a different system and one that caught my eye at the time was Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay probably for no more reason that I liked the artwork. It was only when I started running it using the Enemy Within campaign that it dawned on me how incoherent the world was in our AD&D games and also that a roleplaying game can actually include, well role playing and not adventuring.

My pet peeve though is when you get ambushed in one of those games where
you'll actually arrive at the ambush at a completely arbitrary time,
sometimes days or weeks long variability. What? Do they have perfect
scouting? Is a scry spell being used 24/7? Do they just sit there staking
out the location day after day waiting for the eventual group of enemies?
 Icewind Dale II was particularly egregious on ambushes. You'd stealth
scout an area, see that there were four or five monsters, and then start
the encounter and creatures that were never there in the first place
started "beaming in" and ganking your squishies in the back. It was the
"monster closet" approach, but there was no closet.
 Finally, mages with a full-on combat spell loadout. Um... what? Why does
the wizard have nothing but magic missile, scorching ray, fireball, and
ice storm memorized? Does this guy not use utility spells at all?
 

Icewind Dale I never got on with as although I could see the design behind it of having a more TT D&D experience, I just found that even by then D&D, and what I wanted out of a CRPG, had moved on to having more social interactions and a real story line in them. It's one of the games I never got the enhanced edition of.