Disconnect Between Designer's Intent and Player Intepretation

[Lanefan]

This comes naturally as a consequence of the mechanics.

Killing monsters gets you minuscule amounts of XP. Snatching treasure gets you big amounts of XP.

And by RAW, safely bypassing monsters without killing them got you the same (miniscule) amounts of xp, thus even less incentive to go combat-first.

Snatching treasure without killing the owner first gets you slightly less XP, but the owner also gets to make a lot fewer attack rolls against you that could potentially instant kill.
Also, treasures are hidden away in the monster's stashes, not in a purse on their belt. So if you encounter a wandering monster and fight it, it will cost you hit points, spells, and potions for no real reward in form of XP and probably no magic items.

Where this changed at many tables (including ours) was when xp-for-gp was dropped; and this became RAW in 2e. Now, monsters become the only real source of xp; meaning a greatly-slowed level advancement (good) and combat becoming the go-to option (not so good).

 

[Lanefan]

I guess we are going to have to agree to disagree, because I have no idea really what you are talking about. I can't address hearsay. My experience is no more or less valid than someone else's experience. But I can address the written mechanics of the game and the provided examples of play. I would presume Gygax counts as a designer of D&D, so I can address in particular the modules he wrote and whether they reward snatch and grab and whether his designs privilege something other than combat as the functional way to "win". And I think all the textual evidence is on my side.

Given the harsh rules on disengaging from melee, the idea of snatching someone's purse or loot without killing them first is somehow optimal is... bizarre in the extreme and I never once saw it work that way in practice, even ignoring the problems of snowballing encounters that definitely would come up in Gygaxian designs if you weren't focused on killing a single encounter as fast and as stealthy as possible.

I think you and others are confusing a single principle of Gygaxian skillful play, that is, "Don't get into unnecessary combats" with the whole or primary focus of Gygaxian play. I think this is obvious from your textual example of wandering monsters, which you can proof text from Gygax's writings. Gygaxian play was very much taken from his experience as a wargamer and very much focused on combat as a central pillar if not the central pillar of RPG play. We don't have to text proof from later designs in the Hickman era like Dragonlance or Ravenloft (which are arguably more about avoiding combat than anything Gygax wrote).

One piece of evidence that shows play didn't necessarily go the way Gygax intended is the very existence of Tomb of Horrors, which he wrote as a means of stopping the high-level MUs who had come to completely dominate his game.

 

[James Gasik]

It’s been a while, but back then weren’t Anarchs just part of the Camarilla?

The Camarilla considers every vampire to be part of their sect, at least nominally (with the only notable exception being the Giovanni). That having been said, members of some Clans and most Bloodlines are looked upon with suspicion.

The Anarchs remain more or less Camarilla because while the system is flawed and needs improvement (the central conflict being that no one can really decide what form that improvement should take- on one extreme you have vampires who just want to sit at the big table, and at the other you have vampires who want to burn it all down), it works a lot better than the alternative (ie, the Sabbat, since very few people know the Inconnu and the Tal'mahe'ra even exist), so they thumb their noses at authority as much as they can while still being able to enjoy the protection of the Sect.

Vampires are prone to pretense and blatant hypocrisy, after all.

 

[Celebrim]

One piece of evidence that shows play didn't necessarily go the way Gygax intended is the very existence of Tomb of Horrors, which he wrote as a means of stopping the high-level MUs who had come to completely dominate his game.

I don't know if I'd go that far. I think the appendix on dungeon creation at the end of the 1e DMG shows Gygax's thinking on how monsters relate to high level play quite well, and the fact is that his published thinking at that point only took monsters up to Level X - monsters that in his mind were available as rare/difficult foes as early as level 8 but which by would be routine foes by level 10.

I think it's fair to say that S1 Tomb of Horrors represents Gygax's intention to provide challenge to parties at 10th level or higher, which the game system as written struggled to do. And I think S1 is one of several attempts by Gygax to do that, with another example being WG4 Isle of the Ape. (There were probably others but they didn't get published.) But I don't know that I think you could say that Gygax's intentions are being subverted except to the extent that he seems to initially have thought play would end at about 10th level, and players would take up new characters. The core rules just didn't explain how to challenge a party above 10th level. Nor do I think S1 is specifically an attempt to stop high level spellcasters, so much as high level player characters generally.

S1 is almost unique in the Gygaxian canon and still something of a standout to this day as a pure test of player and not a test of character, and by being almost entirely devoid of meaningful combat challenges. The module is almost as easy to complete if you are a low-level character as a high-level character, but to the extent that class abilities matter at all in Tomb of Horrors it is spellcasting ability. It's spells that are most likely going to get you through the module of anything that is on your character sheet. I think this contrasts with the approach in WG4 where standard Gygaxian combat is back in a big way, and all the classes have challenges to face.

 

[Aldarc]

Numenera by Monte Cook Games

It was billed as exploring a far future science-fiction world for the sake of building a better tomorrow, putting exploration first and combat second, but the PC options were standard fare fantasy derivatives (i.e., mage, warrior, rogue) that were oriented around D&D style combat and dungeon delving.

This was rectified, somewhat, by the revised Numenera: Destiny & Discovery, which provided more non-combat options, more robust salvaging/crafting rules, and rules for upgrading communities.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Since it's hard to sell people on a game where they play victims and their reward is to be the Final Girl in a slasher film, since most of the things you encounter are basically indestructible to normal things like punches to the head, knives, axes, or even chainsaws, of course people are going to make like Ash Williams!

To be fair, that's probably not a good description of the mook level baddies even from the fiction; there's nothing to suggest a shotgun couldn't ruin a Deep One or ghoul's day perfectly fine. Its pretty near certainly true for any of the Named horrors. The stuff in the middle? Who the hell knows in many cases? Since it didn't come up in the fiction, there's no obvious evidence in either direction.

 

[Thomas Shey]

This comes naturally as a consequence of the mechanics.

Killing monsters gets you minuscule amounts of XP. Snatching treasure gets you big amounts of XP.
Snatching treasure without killing the owner first gets you slightly less XP, but the owner also gets to make a lot fewer attack rolls against you that could potentially instant kill.
Also, treasures are hidden away in the monster's stashes, not in a purse on their belt. So if you encounter a wandering monster and fight it, it will cost you hit points, spells, and potions for no real reward in form of XP and probably no magic items.

But then people wanted to play a Lord of the Rings RPG and AD&D was the only system they knew, and that got us Dragonlance and D&D was ruined forevar!

Hey, even in 1975 there were plenty of people trying to play Big Damn Heroes; it was just an uphill fight and the GM better be onboard you doing it. And even then, the bottom end of the character set was ablative as heck.

 

[Thomas Shey]

One piece of evidence that shows play didn't necessarily go the way Gygax intended is the very existence of Tomb of Horrors, which he wrote as a means of stopping the high-level MUs who had come to completely dominate his game.

Even with his biases, when you have games run constantly by overlapping people, the winnowing out process is still going to leave some characters to reach top levels, and if they don't conveniently decide to resign to their towers and castles, well, there's going to probably be a problem in a game not really built to handle them, and that was going to be particularly true of magic-users.

 

[Bohandas]

It is religious, based off medieval cosmology, like Lawful Good is the Roman Church and your alignment language is Latin, where Common is Koine, Greek. It is adaptive though.

It's religious all right, but I think it's based on Discordianism.
About ten years before Dungeons & Dragons first debuted, the Principia Discordia included a diagram that looked similar to a two axis alignment chart and expressed the same basic concept

 

[Bohandas]

To be fair, that's probably not a good description of the mook level baddies even from the fiction; there's nothing to suggest a shotgun couldn't ruin a Deep One or ghoul's day perfectly fine. Its pretty near certainly true for any of the Named horrors. The stuff in the middle? Who the hell knows in many cases? Since it didn't come up in the fiction, there's no obvious evidence in either direction.

For the stuff in the middle or at the top I think you need to be Hellboy instead of Ash. Or possibly Titus Crowe.

In any case, even they didn't get through without being maimed, all three of them have artificial limbs