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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jgsugden" data-source="post: 9642667" data-attributes="member: 2629">You didn't catch my point here. The puzzle was not to get a magic weapon. It was how to deal with a foe you couldn't damage when you didn't have one.  The challenge presented to a low level party was similar to the challenge protagonists face in horror movies when they fight an invulnerable supernatural foe.  "I may not be able to kill you, but I can XXXXX".  What is XXXXX?  That is the puzzle.In the 1980s I encountered my first Jackalwere.  I was a fighter named Dryken DeLerosh - a son of a Thayan Red Wizard that had been changed to Lawful Good by a Helm of Opposite Alignment - going from the most selfish and cruel being to the most noble self sacrificing personality I could must.  Our thief was scouting just ahead of the group when he fell into a pit trap.  The DM and the player went into another room ... and the DM came back.  When we heard nothing the party followed and the wizard took a look into the pit - and fell unconcious ... into the pit.  Dryken didn't look ... he lept.  He landed in the pit to find a 'werewolf' biting into the corpse of the thief while the wizard (who died just from the 30 foot fall) lay in a crumbled heap.  The DM made me make a save to avoid falling asleep when I met its gaze - which I made against the odds - and then the beast attacked.  My first attack hit, but did nothing.  That moment sticks with me.  It is one of the top 10 encounters from 46 years of D&D.  From that point to the end of the encounter was perhaps 4 minutes ... but the DM (who was a 0 for rules understanding at the time ... and 10 for storytelling) made it feel like I was a character in a horror story ... but not the one likely to reach the end of it.  He dropped in 3 or 4 tiny hooks that I could have figured out and could have been used to save me, but I missed all of them as my favorite PC was on the edge of disaster.  Instead, I caught my attention on a thing he said that I saw when I was falling - the loose earth of the side of the pit.  I used the DM's weird grappling rules and flipped the Jackwere into a corner, attacked the wall and collapsed it to bury the beast.  I then recovered the bodies and escaped before it freed itself.  It doesn't sound that exciting when you write it out - but it was one of those moments we all talked about for decades ... if I called that DM today and said, "Feeling like I'm in a Jackalwere pit ..." he would get it.THAT is what we're robbing from the game when we take out all the rough edges.  That is the type of success you get to experience when the rules say, "You can't" and you find a way to anyways.  We lost some of that type of challenge in each edition since.  "Fair" replaced "%$@#ed".  Fair has advantages ... but what we lost also gave us something that could make the game moments iconic.</blockquote>

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