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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Keldryn" data-source="post: 3438277" data-attributes="member: 11999">Of course it's a game, and I never said it wasn't.  Nor did I say that the player should have it easy and not have to go adventuring.  I was specifically referring to much of the "old school" DM advice that often involved really cheap ways to cheat the players out of rewards that they had already earned.  If the players worked hard to overcome a challenge and were rewarded with a powerful item, it's cheap and unfair DMing to arbitrarily take it away because you don't want them to have it anymore.  A good game definitely involves difficult challenges for the PCs to overcome.  But if virtually everything they do, no matter how mundane or trivial, is difficult, then the challenges start to become meaningless."Wandering monsters" start to strain believability in short order if they are over-used.  Unless it's a weird, magical dungeon, there are a finite number of inhabitants.  And if a monster that lives on the other side of the dungeon shows up every time they spend 20 minutes searching a room, it starts to get ridiculous.  And as you said, wandering monsters are essentially not worth the bother, so it wastes even more time.  As adults who work full-time and have families, we don't get to play as often as we did in high school.  If we get to play twice a month for 4-5 hours per session, then we're pretty lucky.  I certainly don't want to waste a good chunk of that time on my players pedantically searching every inch of the dungeon, nor waste even more time playing out the irrelevant wandering monster encounters that result from it.  I don't see anything clever about placing treasure in places where only extremely thorough and anal room-searching is going to locate it.  Then it's just a matter of trial and error or brute force. I didn't say that.  But there is a world of difference between "careless" and "ridiculously cautious bordering on extreme paranoia."  And a lot of longtime players seem to fall into the latter category.  It bores me to tears as a DM when the players suspect a potentially deadly trap at every turn and go through a very involved procedure to make sure it's safe to proceed. If it's player empowerment that a DM should have a justifiable reason for changing the rules, and that those changes should be well thought-out, then I'm all in favour of it.  I don't get why "player empowerment" is treated like a four-letter word.  It's the players' game as much as it is the DM's game -- and if the DM thinks it's mainly his game, then he should probably be writing fan-fiction instead of running a game.  The DM is always in control of the pacing of the game and always has final say on any ruling or the results of any actions the PCs take.  That being said, the players also are not passive simpletons, accepting whatever direction the DM decides the game will go.  The players' decisions and the actions of their PCs is what drives the game forward and players should rightfully feel empowered.  And that is not the same thing as players telling the DM what they should be allowed to use in the game, telling the DM how he or she should run the game, or having an easy ride where they don't have to put any effort into the game and the DM rewards them based on the DMG "reward schedule."I wasn't saying those were identical roles, but this digression into semantics was a nice way of side-stepping my point that the DM's primary role in the game is to ensure that everyone involved is having a good time and that there are opportunities for every player to shine.  All within reason, of course -- I'm not advocating caving in to players who whine about everything and I have no problems telling my players "no."No, I'm not.  In my experience (and virtually everyone I know), campaigns very rarely lasted long enough to get to those higher levels, in no small part due to the fact that the game was not really designed for high-level play and advancement slowed to a crawl after about 10th level.  Of course my personal experience is not necessarily representative of the population at large, but it certainly seems that the majority of campaigns tended to end before advancing to the higher levels.  3e was partially designed with the goal of allowing a campaign of "average length" -- which is about a year according to WoTC's pre-3e research -- to experience the full range of advancement from levels 1 to 20 and all of the higher-level goodies that come with it.  The research may or may not be accurate, but it certainly seems to fit my own experience.It really sounds like you're implying that I haven't read the Immortals rules.I had owned and read through all five D&D sets of that era before I'd ever even owned an AD&D book.  Never actually played the Immortals rules as legitimately advancing from a 1st-level mortal all the way through one of the paths to immortality set out in the Masters rules, but we created some Immortal PCs just for the fun of it.  And yes, it is a very different take on very high-level play than AD&D and D&D 3e.  One thing that I did really like about those D&D Sets 3 to 5 was that they placed a higher emphasis on not just doing pretty much the same thing as levels 1-14 but with more hit points and more magic.  Founding domains, running kingdoms, leading large-scale wars, and achieving true immortality were all much loftier goals for powerful heroes.  It was a pretty loose framework, but I've pretty much always retained some elements of it in my AD&D games.</blockquote>

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