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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6445649" data-attributes="member: 42582">Personally, I think that "within 5 to 7 years" of a hobby that is 40 years old counts as early in the development of the game. Particularly when we're talking about official rule books that sold (and were expected to sell) hundreds of thousands of copies. They are a marker of the responses that had evolved in response to actual play experiences.But these are meant to be challenges for the players. Skilled players will, via detection (eg by dwarves or gnomes), via mapping, etc, realise that they are lost and (as per the advice in Gygax's PHB, p 109) will make finding their way out of the dungeon their number one priority. And the evasion rules from the early game, in combination with the convention that placed monsters don't make forays out of their rooms, will make that feasible - they can run from wanderers, dropping treasure or food to distract pursuers, and make it out.Doing this sort of thing in 3E is much harder, because (i) their are no evasion rules, and (ii) the likelihood that higher level monsters will wipe out lower level PCs is much greater, due to the severe scaling of that edition (the most extreme of any edition).You could say that the extreme scaling of 3E makes deliberate tailoring a type of imperative that it was not, to the same extent, in AD&D and Basic, just because those editions were closer to a type of "bounded accuracy". In 3E, without tailoring, but also without evasion rules, the outcome of "status quo" encounters ends up becoming very much a matter of GM fiat. (That's why I described them, upthread, as looking railroady to me. Quite unlike AD&D, were there are /I] evasion rules and there is not the extreme scaling, so flyers like dragons, chimarae and manticores aside, the PCs can hope to perhaps survive a round and then make their escape.)I don't think that what I find fun is what everyone thinks is fun. But I do think that Gygax meant what he wrote - and once he talks about fudging secret door rolls to expdite progress into interesting parts of the dungeon, pure sand-boxing has been left behind.Nowhere do either Gygax's DMG or Moldvay talk about sand-boxing as a mode of play. The closest Gygax gets is in his discussion of time (pp 37-38), although as is nototorious that discussion makes assumptions about the frequency of real-world play that aren't actually stated, and nothing in that discussion excludes the GM having placed the various game elemens that the players are having their PCs explore in response to expressed player interests- for instance, nothing is suggested about whether the oracle that player character A is off visiting was first introduced at the instigation of the GM, or rather was placed by the GM in response to a query from the player.And there is even the remark that "players involved in the outdoors someplace will either have to come home to 'sit around' or continue adventuring in wildernesses and perhaps in some distant dungeon as well (if you are kind)". What is the kindness that Gygax has in mind? Presumably, the GM placing a dungeon for these players, whose PCs are ahead in the timeline, to explore. Obviously that is not Forge-ist scene-framing, but it's not pure sandboxing either.My reason for makig these points is the one that I stated upthread - that the approaches to authorship, backstory management, scene-framing, etc that are identified with a range of different RPGs (including Forge ones) didn't come from nowhere c 1995. They have their origins in real problems of RPGing, such as (in this case) what to do with a gap between the most natural ingame likelihood (ie that there's nothing much for these PCs to do) and the player expectations of the game (ie that they'll turn up to play and have something interesting for their PCs to do).This is ultimately what the boxes/beard discussion is about, too - if the players are keen on climbing boxes, what is the point of the GM not introducing boxes into the alley and insisting that the players do it his/her preconceived way? If the players want to infiltrate the guild in bearded disguise, what is the pont of the GM insisting that the wizard is clean-shaven, and hence making the infiltration take some other form?The question "what is the point" is not rhetorical. There may be a point - upthread I likened unravelling the GM's intended solution to solving a sudoku - but if the players are looking for something other than sudoku-solving from their RPGing the GM might want to take notice. After all, it's not as if the OP is a statement of total congruence between GM and player expectations and experiences!</blockquote>

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