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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6466674" data-attributes="member: 42582">A quick flip through didn't turn them up in either book.The broader discussion has been about "early D&D", stradding B/X, OD&D and 1st ed AD&D.It's no surprise that the Moldvay rules are better than the AD&D ones, though. That's just a particular instance of a more general phenomenon! I'm reasonably familiar with this sort of play, although in my own experience it is spell load-out rather than equipping that sucks up the planning time, and it is plans for deployment of spells/items etc that constitute the bulk of planning for raids of particular locations.I stand by my remark about "narrow and artificial". This is somewhat true of the combat rules, as you say, but I think moreso of the exploration rules. This comes out in the Luke Crane play report - for instance, in the way he plays the spider that turned up as a random encounter, and in the way that the hobgoblins are happy to bargain with the heavily-armed stranger who has turned up in their neighbourhood, and would cheerfully kill and rob them if he had a few friends with him. That's nothing like a normal social interaction - it is more like Diplomacy (as per the posts above) but instantiated into individuals rather than 19th century nation-states, and hence producing personalities that have no resemblance to anything normal that I can think of.As soon as one asks, How would hobgoblins respond if we really think about the social dynamics between invaders and denezins, perhaps with refrence to real world examples? then the resolution of that scenario becomes very improbable. The hobgoblins could have just killed the fighter and taken his stuff.Combat is not artificial in that way - it doesn't require such a radically unrealistic way of framing human motivations and actions. I think the drift to combat as a focus of conflict is associated with a broader drift towards "verisimilitue" in world design, playing NPCs, etc. I think this works in conjunction with the alignment-driven change I've mentioned upthread.I don't think this contrast is as marked as you are suggesting it to be. For instance, once the players learn about reaction rolls (either by reading the rule book, or by seeing the GM make them during play) it is going to occur to them that they can declare actions for their PCs that improve reaction rolls.In the pursuit scenario that Luke Crane describes, the player, if he knows the spider's movement rate, can make a mecanicall-informed decision about the feasibility of escape, the need to ditch equipment (the weight of which is recorded with perfect accuracy on the character sheet), etc.If the GM's decisions are motivated or determined by mechanical considerations, the players can extrapolate to these and apply them in their own reasoning.</blockquote>

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