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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8834061" data-attributes="member: 42582">Gygax's DMG seems intended primarily to support "sandbox" RPGing. But it has quite detailed rules for building "balanced" dungeon levels, dungeon encounters, etc.What seems to be the key to Gygax's approach is that the players (i) have the opportunity to gain knowledge about the GM's set-up without having to fully engage with it (eg by scouting, scrying, collecting rumours, etc; this depends on the GM playing their set-up with at least a reasonable degree of stasis), and then (ii) get to chance which bit of the set-up to fully engage with.So when designing a set-up for players of low-level PCs, the GM should incudes parts of the set-up that make good targets for those characters, and make it reasonably possible for the players to learn about those parts of the set-up.This doesn't seem to have a great deal to do with "combat as war" or "combat as sport", as it's largely about how scenes are framed rather than how conflicts are resolved. However, there may be a procedural connection in the following way: just as "combat as war" involves the players leveraging bits of fiction external to the PC build as such (I'm paraphrasing [USER=28487]@UngainlyTitan[/USER] here), so Gygaxian play involves the players leveraging bits of fiction external to the PC to help direct the framing of scenes.It seems likely that some players like to play RPGs which combine both modes of players leveraging the fiction.</blockquote>

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