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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 9551983" data-attributes="member: 7026617">We occasionally saw morale checks for bearers during the slice of time they were used (same for mules, but honestly, unless a problem is right on them mules are more phlegmatic than most humans...), which is why the MU or MUs usually carried a torch as a backup (at least in OD&D I don't recall ever hitting a GM that wouldn't let a mage cast one handed).  Also, just to be nit-picky, it was 6 exploration turns (10 min a pop).  The encumbrance still didn't add up to much unless you were in a very sparse dungeon (because, again, it doesn't matter if the dungeon theoretically had more extent than was easy to handle with torches if you were going to turn around and go out as soon as the spellcasters ran dry, which was liable to happen quickly at the lower levels when the ancillary costs with light were most noticeable.   Those bottom-end characters were usually the least likely to try and do things like camp in a dungeon, too.I'm not saying the solutions for this didn't sometimes have their own complications, but that never stopped people from using them IME, and they at the very least moved lighting out of a resource-consumption problem, or, for the most part, a significant factor in how difficult the dungeon was, since most of the same solutions were needed to be able to haul significant treasure out anyway.With most parties, expecting to get surprise was a fool's game anyway; if people ran into GMs who were kind about thinking people in chain or plate were particularly quiet, or regular light sources weren't visible at a pretty fair distance, they're pretty much unicorns.  You could potentially hit specialty groups that were trying for that route, but the trade-off at the bottom was going to make it functionally impossible there anyway.I'm just of the opinion that a GM had to be bending over backwards to make it routinely a problem even then.  Like I said, about the only time I saw it as a factor was when magical darkness was involved.It is, but I have to note a lot of those kind of obstacles could effectively make the same area impassible for the PCs depending on how the GM handled them; in the OD&D days things like climbing and jumping were so vaguely handled that before you even wanted to try you wanted to make good and sure it wasn't just an invitation for most of the group to take damage, and later on when skills or proficiencies became a thing, a lot of characters were poor enough at it to add up to the same.  There's a reason a lot of people just shrug and wave magic at those sorts of problems if they can, and if they can't just won't even try.  The cliff is a little better because you can do some finessing with rope but the 10' pit is often going to turn into "Let's find out if we can go around or forget it." Again, that's probably only a big problem at the bottom end when the mule is more economic than bearers anyway.  Beyond that, either there are other solutions to the problems, or any obstacle bearers can't handle at least some of the PCs probably can't, either.</blockquote>

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