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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6442829" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm not "deliberately misreading" it - it implies that tailored encounters "adapt themselves to the PCs", which is an ingame/real-world confusion.There are other oddities also - for instance, the unstated but pretty obvious assumption that combat is the main mode of encounter resolution, which connects to an assumption that players won't have their PCs flee unless the GM tells them in advance to be ready to do so.Classic AD&D had evasion and pursuit rules for just these purposes; their absence from 3E is part of what makes me read some of this stuff about fleeing rather than fighting as pretty railroad-y.Sandbox exploration is not recommended either in Moldvay Basic or in Gygax's DMG. So the "codification" you are referring to goes back to the late-70s/early-80s period.Both Moldvay and Gygax recommend building a dungeon suitable for low-level PCs, and neither suggests that wilderness encounter tables will be used as part of the journey to that dungeon.In Moldvay this is obvious from the fact that the rules have no wilderness encounter tables, nor in fact any rules for non-dungeon exploration. In Gygax, the relevant discussion is on pp 86-7 and 96:Rome wasn't built in a day. You are probably just learning so take small steps at first. The milieu for initial adventures should be kept to a size commensurate with the needs of campaign participants . . . This will typically result in our giving them a brief background, placing them in a settlement, and stating that they should prepare themselves to find and explore the dungeon/ruin they know is nearby. . . . Your participants are now eagerly awaiting instructions from you as to how to find the place they are eager to seek their fortunes in. . . . You inform them that  . . . one of the braver villagers will serve as a guide if they wish to explore the ruins! . . . You inform them that after about a two mile trek along a seldom-used road, they come to the edge of a fen. . . . You describe the general bleakness of the bog . . . [T]he party has only one place to go - along the causeway - if they wish to adventure. The leading member of the group . . .  orders that the party should proceed along the raised pathway to the monastery, and the real adventure begins.Dungeon levels, and the hierarchy of monsters that goes with it, is about as metagame as it gets! The overlay of a "setting conceit" is an obvious figleaf.It's true that players may find themselves on the "wrong" level, but for lower-level PCs that is typically a marker of poor or unlucky play (eg not noticing that they were walking down a sloping passage, falling down a pit trap, etc), while for higher-level PCs it may be part of a strategy of "playing it safe" - which the GM is directed to push back against in the XP rules.In OD&D the relevant push-back was the XP multiplier of character level over dungeon level (ie high level PCs on low dungeon levels receive only fractional XP). In AD&D that is revised (DMG, p 84) to a rule that XP are to be multiplied by a fraction of total monster HD by total PC levels in those circumstances where the numerator is less than the denominator.The existence of these rules, whose function is to push high level PCs onto lower levels if the players of those PCs want to get XP advancement, belies the notion of dungeon levels as a mere setting conceit.</blockquote>

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