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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 4283762" data-attributes="member: 5143">They didn't matter to the people running 1st or 2nd Ed.  Can your character repair a house?  I don't know...make an Int check, the rules don't say.  In fact, most of the best moments I had in these editions were precisely BECAUSE the rules didn't tell us everything our characters could do, we got to make up some of it that wasn't that important.Tomb of Horrors is a bad example.  It was pretty much written as "Do exactly what I think you should do or die immediately if you can't figure it out).  Not exactly a fun time.Exactly.  The tactics were entirely missing.  So, for most people who played them it ended up being like this:"We go down the hallway.""There are 3 giants in the next room.  They see you, roll for initiative"*insert many rounds of rolling to hit and damage with no tactics at all*"Alright, we search their bodies then head down another hallway"And repeat.Monsters in 1st and 2nd Ed were generally very weak.  Most parties were able to beat them quite a few levels below when they were meant to be faced.  Especially if you had a group who could abuse the rules well like mine did.  Within a round, we'd have convinced our DM that one of our level 1 illusion spells or a cantrip could keep one of the giants completely out of the fight while we fought the other 2.Depends on how you look at it.  I rather enjoy wandering through hallways killing giants.  I have lots of fun with it.Here's the meat of it.  When we played 2nd Ed, there was all this flowery storyline.  There were hundreds and hundreds of pages of books that would tell us what gravity worked like on a Spelljamming ship, what the ground felt like on the 432nd layer of the Abyss, and what Kobolds like to eat for breakfast.When we'd actually play the game, however, the DM would come up with a problem for us to solve, we'd then have to kill some monsters in order to achieve that goal.  I'd say less than 1% of the stuff in any of those books actually came up during a session ever(except as fun things to joke about outside of the game).D&D adventures have, pretty much since the beginning been a series of combats tied together by a common plot(the giants are attacking people...put an end to it, there are evil people in a temple...go figure out what they are up to, slavers are kidnapping people...stop them, etc).  However, they weren't explicitly spelled out like that.  They'd give you a long background as to WHY the slavers were taking people, what their camp looked like, the unique symbol on the leader's sword and so on.  The stat blocks for the monsters were always only a couple of lines, so they APPEARED to be a small portion of the adventure.  Until the adventure saw play.  Then, they pretty much all ended up the same way: "You approach the camp and someone spots you and sounds an alarm.  Roll for initiative."I've played in a lot of D&D campaigns in a lot of editions.  I can tell you that when you strip the flowery text and pretense away, they all end up one of 2 ways: Aimlessly reacting to whatever the players do OR a series of battles connected by a plot.  The battles would take 80% of the time spent playing the game and the plot would be 20% and largely involved trying to get to monsters to have another battle.3e and 4e both pretty much realized that and are now writing down more information and more detail on the part of the game that people spend the most time in.  If you are going to spend 80% of your time in battles, they might as well have interesting options instead of rolling attack and damage rolls over and over until the enemies were dead.  Why should the DM need to make up the terrain, the effects of the terrain on combat, the starting locations of all the enemies, the tactics of all the enemies?  All of that adds a barrier to entry as a DM.I could tell you that we got so bored of battles in 2nd Ed that our DM used to just point at people in a clockwise direction and they were simply supposed to answer how much damage they did(he told us the ACs of enemies).  We didn't move around, we didn't vary our tactics, it was simply who ran out of hitpoints first.  Except for the Wizard, he got to take 10 minutes figuring out if his Web spell was sticking people and how many he got and how hard it was for them to get out.</blockquote>

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