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General Tabletop Discussion
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Encounter balance in AD&D
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6984104" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>Agreed on both points.</p><p></p><p>I take you to mean the first as a matter of historical report. My agreement is based simply on my experience as a reader/user: leaving aside actual incoherence (like the initiative rules), so many components of the game (such as encounters) have their rules scattered rather randomly throughout the book. (The frequency of dungeon wandering monster checks is not even stated, and has to be inferred from the description of "once per three turns" in cities as the standard frequency.)</p><p></p><p>On the second point, I've had a couple of recent conversations on these boards which have driven it home. I am coming to feel that, in D&D play, perhaps nothing is more fundamental than the answer to the question: who chooses the encounters, players or GM? Because classic D&D answers "the players" - by choosing which rooms to enter/raid; and by choosing when not to run from wandering monsters - it's approach to balancing is naturally quite different from what is typical in the modern game.</p><p></p><p>But I get a bit frustrated by people who are playing games in which <em>the GM</em> chooses the encounters, and yet make a big deal about the importance of "smart" or "cautious" players realising that some of them need to be avoided rather than confronted. This might be good or bad D&D (to me, without more context, it often seems rather railroad-y), but comparing it to player-driven dungeon exploration is (in my view) just wrong. The best I can make of it is that the GM is framing the players into a puzzle, where the consequence of the wrong choice (fighting when the GM intended the PCs to flee) is character death.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 6984104, member: 42582"] Agreed on both points. I take you to mean the first as a matter of historical report. My agreement is based simply on my experience as a reader/user: leaving aside actual incoherence (like the initiative rules), so many components of the game (such as encounters) have their rules scattered rather randomly throughout the book. (The frequency of dungeon wandering monster checks is not even stated, and has to be inferred from the description of "once per three turns" in cities as the standard frequency.) On the second point, I've had a couple of recent conversations on these boards which have driven it home. I am coming to feel that, in D&D play, perhaps nothing is more fundamental than the answer to the question: who chooses the encounters, players or GM? Because classic D&D answers "the players" - by choosing which rooms to enter/raid; and by choosing when not to run from wandering monsters - it's approach to balancing is naturally quite different from what is typical in the modern game. But I get a bit frustrated by people who are playing games in which [I]the GM[/I] chooses the encounters, and yet make a big deal about the importance of "smart" or "cautious" players realising that some of them need to be avoided rather than confronted. This might be good or bad D&D (to me, without more context, it often seems rather railroad-y), but comparing it to player-driven dungeon exploration is (in my view) just wrong. The best I can make of it is that the GM is framing the players into a puzzle, where the consequence of the wrong choice (fighting when the GM intended the PCs to flee) is character death. [/QUOTE]
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