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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TiQuinn" data-source="post: 9466015" data-attributes="member: 4871">Gygax was a mass of contradictions and his rules and the way they actually played reflected that. I’m not really interested in quoting him as if he was writing scripture.Tell me: if monsters were all waiting behind doors for the party to find them, why did the monster manual have a percentage chance to encounter monsters in their lair? Where were they the rest of the time?This idea of “skilled dungeon play” was a Gygax term that really didn’t mean much. I hate that everything in 1e comes back to this but he disregarded many of these rules in his own game.It’s a shift to site based adventuring to story based adventuring, yes. Of course the DM is still the one creating the site just as it is the DM creating the story.Yes, those features exist because the goal is to hide the treasure from the party and make it hard to find or hard to remove. But the DM has the ability to “frame the scene” by having monsters act intelligently, a concept that goes back to modules like Dark Tower, Caverns of Thracia, Temple of Elemental Evil, and Against the Giants. None of those assumed the monsters sat around waiting for PCs to slaughter whatever was in the room. Once again, what may be written in the 1e PHB or DMG is not necessarily what was put into practice. “Skilled dungeon play” indeed. <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="🙄" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f644.png" title="Face with rolling eyes    :rolling_eyes:" data-shortname=":rolling_eyes:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />Sure there was. There were usually many goals including individual goals, class goals, as well as class goals.That was always the case. There’s no game without the DM to adjudicate and create or run the dungeon.</blockquote>

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