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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8287311" data-attributes="member: 42582">To add to my post just upthread (#630):There is a real contrast here between classic D&D and 4e D&D.In 4e D&D the availability, from upper Heroic Tier, of various forms of travel magic changes the subject matter of the shared fiction. The fiction can no longer be confined to a modest locality, because the players can have their PCs break out of that if they wish to.But the actual process of play, whereby players confront and overcome challenges, doesn't change: at Heroic Tier the skill challenge was to move through a goblin-infested forest; at Paragon Tier it was to move through the Underdark; at Epic Tier it was to cross a layer of the Abyss. The fiction changes, and so the stakes and themes become grander in fictional terms, but the players are doing the same thing process-wise. Equally this is so in combat.By contrast, AD&D envisages clear changes in the process of play as the PCs gain levels. Players of high level PCs don't have to engage with dungeon geography, or overland geography, in the way that players of lower-level PCs have to. And the planar adventures that high level PCs undertake are supposed to be different not just in fiction but in the processes of play (see eg Gygax's discussion in his DMG, including his ideas about plane-hopping to Gamma World or Boot Hill; modules like the Dungeonland/Magic Mirror adventures, Isle of the Ape and Q1; all the rules modifications in the AD&D Manual of the Planes; etc). And there is an obvious expectation that combat at high levels will include mass wargame elements (armies, siege rules etc) that probably won't figure at lower-levels.Saying there can still be an overarching goal of skilled or clever play in both low and high level AD&D play is true but not very informative: it doesn't tell us what to actually expect when we turn up to the table. To get that useful information we have to actually attend to the processes of play that are apt to emerge from the sorts of moves made available to the players of various levels of PC. This is where moves like Passwall and Teleport play a pretty different role from moves like Hold Portal (replaces iron spikes) or Knock (replaces a STR or pick lock check) or even Phantasmal Forces (permits a new avenue for deceiving/manipulating NPCs and monsters).</blockquote>

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