The mythical ideal of 1E?

[JDJblatherings]

Even at very low levels, something like Keep on the Borderland has encounters with dozens of opponents that you are expected to win at first level.

...

If you played well and there were 6-10 PCs and a couple of henchmen and a goodly number of 0-level men at arms then there was a fair chance of survival. You weren't "expected to win" that wasn't how the modules were written in those days.

 

[JDJblatherings]

Nope, can't say that I did. I never found wandering monsters a terribly compelling concept.

Wandering monsters are a useful mechanic to keep the action moving and to keep the players guessing.

* Spend 2 hours searching a room, that could mean a number of wandering monsters turn up and nothign found.

* Raid two more rooms? Sure we have enough supplies but what about the wandering monsters we might have to face also?

There are many short comings to haphazard use of wandering monsters but they are certainly a mechanic of balance and enforcing resource management.

 

[Chainsaw]

Nope, can't say that I did. I never found wandering monsters a terribly compelling concept.

To each his own, I guess. We usually enjoyed dungeon and campaign settings where the concept of a random encounter (wandering monster, wandering NPC, etc) fit in naturally. It always heightened the tension and kept people on their toes. Obviously though, it requires a little player/DM trust.. so that it doesn't feel like the DM gets to "punish" players every time they decide to "spoil" his trap.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

To each his own, I guess. We usually enjoyed dungeon and campaign settings where the concept of a random encounter (wandering monster, wandering NPC, etc) fit in naturally. It always heightened the tension and kept people on their toes. Obviously though, it requires a little player/DM trust.. so that it doesn't feel like the DM gets to "punish" players every time they decide to "spoil" his trap.

I tended to run loose, narrative heavy games based on story where players were encouraged to derail the game and take it in new directions. Dungeons and sandboxing was rare.

 

[Hussar]

If you played well and there were 6-10 PCs and a couple of henchmen and a goodly number of 0-level men at arms then there was a fair chance of survival. You weren't "expected to win" that wasn't how the modules were written in those days.

Are you honestly trying to say that there was an expectation that you would lose? No, let's state it stronger than that, that the base assumption was that you would fail? I don't think so. The base assumption was that you would succeed. You might burn through a couple of characters in the process, but, it wasn't a guaranteed death sentence either.

And, again, it comes down to numbers. Sure, we've got 6 PC's, standard party 3 fighter (types) a wizard, cleric and a thief. Ok, our 3 fighter types all have an AC of 2 (basic D&D plate was only 60 gp, plus a shield) and the baddies have a THAC0 of 19, meaning they only hit on a 17 or better. Three baddies on each fighter, assuming we're blocking the way to get to the easier hit guys. The fighters are getting hit maybe once per round. For a d6 points of damage.

Past first level, killing PC's in early editions with straight up damage was not the easiest thing in the world to do. Typically death came from Save or Die (which there was LOADS of). The point of my little story was that you could repeatedly engage enemies at a 3:1 disadvantage and come out on top more often than not.

That does not speak to me of a character that is just slightly above average. You certainly don't need those henchmen and the rest. That's just icing on the cake.

 

[Raven Crowking]

To be honest, no, there weren't a lot of wandering monsters. DM's or dice's decision? Not sure.

I can remember DMing one game in high school (circa 1982), and my friend Keith asked me, "Why don't you ever use wandering monsters?"

They had just finished fighting a giant toad that was, in fact a wandering monster. In the course of the ensuing discussion, I discovered that he and his brother thought that all the wandering monsters they had encountered were planned encounters. Even when they were in areas that the party had cleared out.

To this day I don't know if that's a compliment on my presentation of wandering monsters, or a criticism.




RC

 

[thecasualoblivion]

D&D was initially designed based on wargame perspectives. In wargames, your playing pieces are largely expendible, and the original D&D game treated them as expendible, or at the very least fragile. When the roleplaying hobby began to take hold, people started to place value on playing an ongoing character with personality and a story, and fragile expendible characters and "Gotcha!" DMs didn't work well with that, and people started playing the game differently than it was written.

 

[Chainsaw]

I tended to run loose, narrative heavy games based on story where players were encouraged to derail the game and take it in new directions. Dungeons and sandboxing was rare.

Cool. Our games were basically completed scripted, where the players just read aloud what I'd written for them.. kidding!

More seriously, maybe I'm misunderstanding you - are you suggesting that random encounters don't fit in with what you've described?

 

[thecasualoblivion]

Cool. Our games were basically completed scripted, where the players just read aloud what I'd written for them.. kidding!

More seriously, maybe I'm misunderstanding you - are you suggesting that random encounters don't fit in with what you've described?

I designed my games around major plot points and events, with almost no detail given to how the game got there or what happened in between. That I created on the fly to flesh out what was happening at the table, and often things went in a different direction forcing me to abandon those plots/events. There was no such thing as a random encounter, because most of the time there was no such thing as a planned encounter. There were spontaneous encounters, which were spawned by the story.

For example, lets look at moving from town A to town B. If the game session/story had time for an encounter, I'd throw an encounter at them in most cases. It didn't really matter to me when, and it was not random. If I wanted things to move along, an encounter did not happen.

 

[The Highway Man]

I see many people invoking a mystical ideal of 1E AD&D that seems to me far above the objective reality of how the game was actually played. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't a lot of the small changes and refocusing of D&D that occured with the 2E revision a response to how most people played the game, and the most commonly used houserules? A lot of what 2E revised and/or discarded from 1E are included in this mystical ideal of 1E that gets brought up here. While the 2E revision alienated some people, the vast majority of D&D players happily converted. I think that fact gets lost in the cloud of 1E nostalgia sometimes.

I don't really see how the two ideas would be opposites. You can have a concept that could be branded "1E ideal" while not necessarily believing 1E was perfect by any means, or that everything about 2E was trash.

1E for me isn't "perfect" by any means. I also happen to believe that no game system can satisfy every need. For me, 1E is the D&D I want to play. It's the one that fires up my imagination, the one I feel the most comfortable to use.

I don't see any contradiction here.