Can someone explain what "1st ed feel" is?

[Pielorinho]

Re: Re: Can't we all just get along?

P.S. - Just to clear a point that Pielorhino made - consistency is important, this is true. However, having mysteries in a scenario are quite useful too. I sometimes in my group's adventure put things that make no sense whatsoever, just to (A) tick them off, (B) keep them guessing, (C) leave that sense of wonder in a game but putting something in there that may never be explained. However, if the dungeon has 100 cultists in it, and I only found enough bedding for 10 people, or if it had a dragon stuck in a 10' x 10' room, I would be concerned.

I'm with you on that, Henry, and I'm not one of the people that equates 1E with Diablo. Your example of teh dungeon with 100 cultists and 10 beds might be a better example of what I'm talking about than my ill-fated corridor example (although I'm sure you'll get twenty responses pointed out the free love the cultists obviously espouse, or how their religion makes them sleep standing up, or how they each sleep 2.4 hours a day in shifts).

And mysteries are great. My PCs may never know what happened to the ship full of ghouls that disappeared during the storm. They may never know what kind of being it was that appeared in the temple and seemed impervious to their attacks. They may never know why the aye-aye demon seemed to be cooperating with a priest of vermin.

But I know. As a DM, that's my job.

I had a writing instructor, when I was younger, who insisted that I should always know what kind of underwear my characters wore. I should know what they liked to eat for breakfast, I should know their favorite joke, I should know what they thought about when they couldn't sleep. None of that might appear in the story -- but if I didn't know it, my readers could tell.

To a lesser degree, that's something really important to me in a game. My PCs may never talk with the aye-aye demon: six seconds after meeting it, it's busy summoning rings of fire around them and implanting suggestions in their minds with its groping mental fingers. But if I don't know why it's there, what it wants, what it fears, then the players can tell -- and the story will lose some of its cohesion.

(in case you're wondering, aye-aye demons wear bikini briefs)

Daniel

 

[ColonelHardisson]

Re: Re: Re: Can't we all just get along?

(although I'm sure you'll get twenty responses pointed out the free love the cultists obviously espouse, or how their religion makes them sleep standing up, or how they each sleep 2.4 hours a day in shifts).

I guess what's important is that such inconsistencies often stimulate creativity, like in your example, and make individualization of adventures not only likely, but essential. All three of your examples are good, and would make great rationalizations for that dungeon set-up. If the hypothetical dungeon had been clearly delineated by the writer, such creativity would have been effectively quashed.

I've been thinking - is it possible that we are simply not quite finding the common ground here? I mean, I like consistency, for the most part. That was always one of the things I strove for in my own adventure design. I simply don't like overwritten modules/adventures, where the author is too strong a presence in my campaigns. I'm not really against your conceptions of what a game should be, and I don't think you're really against mine. I think the difference is in how we perceive 1e modules. Where I saw a framework around which to build my own saga, you see implausibility. Many of the old modules did have consistency; it's just that the authors didn't waste a lot of space telling you about it. But it was there for those who looked.

 

[Psion]

Had I ever complained about the corridors that curved, you might have a point.

You certianly groused about them not being straight and when I and others brought up geophysical factor and mining veins as reasons why they might not be straigh, you justified that they would be so because of the presence of magic. Using all-too-convenient magic as an excuse is something normally reserved for illogical dungeon design.

Given that, I hope you will excuse me if I didn't follow up on the subsequent mincing of words to protect your case.

How would you like your broken glass cooked?

Interestingly, of all the people that have jumped on me for disliking illogically-designed dungeons, none have made the claim that 1E held plausibility to a high standard.

I imagine they want to pick fights they can win.

 

[Pielorinho]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Can't we all just get along?

I've been thinking - is it possible that we are simply not quite finding the common ground here? I mean, I like consistency, for the most part. That was always one of the things I strove for in my own adventure design. I simply don't like overwritten modules/adventures, where the author is too strong a presence in my campaigns. I'm not really against your conceptions of what a game should be, and I don't think you're really against mine. I think the difference is in how we perceive 1e modules. Where I saw a framework around which to build my own saga, you see implausibility. Many of the old modules did have consistency; it's just that the authors didn't waste a lot of space telling you about it. But it was there for those who looked.

I think you're mostly right, Colonel. I *do* like the adventure-writer to give me something plausible and wonderful to start with; I'll already plan on modifying the adventure heavily for my own campaign, but if it starts off so that I can believe it, it saves me work.

Often I find that adventures are so implausible to begin with, however, that it's an overwhelming amount of work to get them to the plausible point. It'd almost be simpler for me to start from scratch.

But I expect that we could enjoy playing in one another's games; we just approach DM prepwork differently, it sounds like.

To continue with the 100 cultists/10 beds situation, if an adventure includes that, then my players are likely to notice (in a recent adventure, they did just that: they counted cultists' beds and tallied up the cultists they'd killed, to make sure they hadn't missed anyone). When they notice that, if it hasn't occurred to me first, then I can either retrofit the adventure (uh, you guys noticed that the cultists were all huggy-kissy when you were fighting them), or I can act mysterious ("how odd," I'll say, and then the players will go off and spend two frustrating game hours looking for the beds for the remaining cultists), or I can tell them ("don't look at this too closely, guys, this adventure has a first-edition feel!")

If the author had started off with a plausible scenario, I wouldn't have the problem.

Daniel

 

[Pielorinho]

You certianly groused about them not being straight. Excuse me if I fail to see your subsequent mincing of words as significant. You certianly groused about them not being straight. Excuse me if I fail to see your subsequent mincing of words as significant.

If you insist, I'll excuse you. But since I distinguished three times in this thread between the curvy corridors (which could be accounted for by everyone's explanations) and the corridors that broke my suspension of disbelief, I do believe the failure to see a failure.

Daniel

 

[WSmith]

The 100 cultists with 10 beds ...

BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Ok, it was teh funny thinking how to fit 10 into each bed.

More seriously, these were the sort of things that I was great at. "Where did the other 90 come from?" Then my wheels would start turning in microseconds, I had a side plot of a secreted portal somewhere in the dungeon that lead to a cultists safehouse in the coastal city.

THAT is what I think the good Col. is talking about. Taking an omission or glaring error and turning it into story.

 

[Ulrick]

First edition feel is like the old definition of pornography: "I cant describe it, but I know it when I see it."

Clark

"It's like warm apple pie..."

 

[WSmith]

"It's like warm apple pie..."

"Then there was this one time, at band camp, we were playing dungeons and dragons, and this was the first edition, and there was a demon on the cover of the rulebook, and I thougt it was about worshiping the devil, but I found out it was about fighting evil monsters, and the girl was almost naked, and I wanted to play a vampire hunter and it reminded me of this one time, at band camp..."

 

[Grazzt]

Originally posted by Orcus
First edition feel is like the old definition of pornography: "I cant describe it, but I know it when I see it."

Clark

It's about "Dave, get the barbarian in the corner another drink, quick!."

 

[ColonelHardisson]

THAT is what I think the good Col. is talking about. Taking an omission or glaring error and turning it into story.

Yes, exactly! I just assume that there is a logical reason for what is given, and then work it into my story.

There are a lot of things in life that are not logical or seem to have no reason behind them, but we don't notice until we start to think about them.

Let's say we designed an adventure for a modern game on World War II warship - say a submarine. Now, some will probably notice that there aren't enough bunks for the crew; that's because they used "hot bunking," in which more than one crewman uses each bunk, and they are rotated on duty shifts.

Sure, it takes a bit more to explain the 10 bunks/100 cultists scenario, but hey, how much sleep does an evil cultist need?

Babylon 5 had a great little monologue by the character Londo about how he noticed at the Imperial Palace there was a guard stationed in the middle of a courtyard, with nothing to guard. Eventually he found out that a princess from centuries before had seen a flower growing there and had posted the guard to keep it from harm, and then forgot about it. Bureaucracy and tradition had kept the guard there long after even the princess was dead, let alone the flower.

Dungeons are very often forgotten or ruined strongholds from centuries before. Human nature (and the nature of human-like beings) always results in some quirks of design. Take the Winchester Mystery House, or the palace of that "Mad Prince" in Bavaria (never can remember his name!) - wouldn't they seem illogical as dungeons?

Now, I'm not defending things like monsters bigger than the rooms they're in or orcs trying to do a "Stand on Zanzibar" scenario in a 10x10 room or flying creatures stuck hundreds of feet below the surface or ecosystems without any water or food access. I really don't remember any of the classic 1e modules having a lot of stuff like that. Homebrew dungeons had stuff like that all the time, but that isn't really an essential ingredient for 1e feel.