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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8141849" data-attributes="member: 82106">Good historical summary. I would only add that hexcrawl, leading to stronghold play, was a vital evolutionary axis which provided some flexibility in terms of what happened as PCs leveled in the original (1e and earlier/some of the Basic line) game, at least as-written. When your game began to sport PCs of level 7+ they would start moving out of the dungeon proper and move across the landscape, hexcrawling. This has a pretty structured process similar to dungeon crawling in 1e (it is just referred to the AH Survival game in OD&D, though there are encounter matrices available). Once these PCs get into stronghold/tower/whatever development then most of their 'calendar time' becomes absorbed and troupe play is supposed to refocus on their lower level henchmen/associates/alternate PCs, with the 'big boys' only reappearing in person for 'special events'. The first modules were the G-D-Q series, which are definitely name-level and above. You can see how Gygax approached the problems of expanding character option and the difficulty of maintaining some reasonable form of skilled play. The dungeon simply becomes vast in scale and the opponents highly challenging. Eventually the various scenarios break down into more loosely connected environments, like the Vault of the Drow and its city, where 'anything can happen'. That does take a pretty long time though. Playing through that set of modules is probably a good solid 6 months or more of play! Maybe even years depending on how fast you go.</blockquote>

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