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Encounter balance in AD&D
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6984424" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>Yes. That's one of the important differences between the "classic" and the modern game, and one of the mechanisms whereby the players rather than the GM manage what it is that the PCs encounter.</p><p></p><p>In the context of XP for gold, dropping treasure to avoid encounters is actually quite close to 13th Age's "suck up a campaign failure to escape an encounter" rule - but 40 years earlier.</p><p></p><p>I think at low levels it's certainly harder - but that's what all those detection spell and items are for.</p><p></p><p>I think the idea of the dungeon as dynamic, with inhabitants who do more than sit in their rooms waiting to be killed, is actually the beginning of the end of what I have called classic D&D. Because at that point there are, for practical purposes, no constraints on what the GM can do; and scouting out and planning objectives on the players' part has no guaranteed connection to what the PCs will actually find when they (say) return to the 5th level looking to loot the manticore room.</p><p></p><p>Another way to express what I think is the same point: D&D in its original form was unstable between the "wargaming" element and the "fantasy adventure story" element. A relatively early discussion that brings this out is Roger Musson's essays on dungeon design ("The Dungeon Architect") in early 80s White Dwarf, where you can see him struggling to reconcile the game as a player-driven dungeon-exploration game with the idea of a GM-authored backstory and dynamic, interactive NPCs and settings.</p><p></p><p>I think this instability is what leads to the railroading style that dominated from the mid-to-late 80s through to 3E, and then the more contemporary "Adventure Path" style which is (as best I can tell) a game in which the players decipher the adventure-author's puzzles and fight their way through the combats hoping not to get too unlucky. This is the sort of play in which Gygaxian wargaming language (liked "skilled play") is used to describe something quite different - roughly, guessing what the GM has in mind in terms of world-building/encounter motivation (given some degree of "living, breathing world") so as to work out whether the best move is to fight, or flee, or try and negotiate, etc.</p><p></p><p>A lot of the current threads on the 5e board remind me of a post you (chaochou) made at least a couple of years ago now, pointing out that time constraints in adventures are about pacing and drama-management on the GM side, rather than resource management on the player side, given that the players don't have access to the information about time constraints, and can't control it (eg from the players' point of view it is arbitrary whether or not the GM - as part of managing the living, breathing world - decides that the villains lose a day because they got hung over after a particularly indulgent evening at the Den of Iniquity). To me, this sort of game seems to have lost almost all the elements that a classic dungeon offered for the testing of wargaming, resource management and force deployment skill.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 6984424, member: 42582"] Yes. That's one of the important differences between the "classic" and the modern game, and one of the mechanisms whereby the players rather than the GM manage what it is that the PCs encounter. In the context of XP for gold, dropping treasure to avoid encounters is actually quite close to 13th Age's "suck up a campaign failure to escape an encounter" rule - but 40 years earlier. I think at low levels it's certainly harder - but that's what all those detection spell and items are for. I think the idea of the dungeon as dynamic, with inhabitants who do more than sit in their rooms waiting to be killed, is actually the beginning of the end of what I have called classic D&D. Because at that point there are, for practical purposes, no constraints on what the GM can do; and scouting out and planning objectives on the players' part has no guaranteed connection to what the PCs will actually find when they (say) return to the 5th level looking to loot the manticore room. Another way to express what I think is the same point: D&D in its original form was unstable between the "wargaming" element and the "fantasy adventure story" element. A relatively early discussion that brings this out is Roger Musson's essays on dungeon design ("The Dungeon Architect") in early 80s White Dwarf, where you can see him struggling to reconcile the game as a player-driven dungeon-exploration game with the idea of a GM-authored backstory and dynamic, interactive NPCs and settings. I think this instability is what leads to the railroading style that dominated from the mid-to-late 80s through to 3E, and then the more contemporary "Adventure Path" style which is (as best I can tell) a game in which the players decipher the adventure-author's puzzles and fight their way through the combats hoping not to get too unlucky. This is the sort of play in which Gygaxian wargaming language (liked "skilled play") is used to describe something quite different - roughly, guessing what the GM has in mind in terms of world-building/encounter motivation (given some degree of "living, breathing world") so as to work out whether the best move is to fight, or flee, or try and negotiate, etc. A lot of the current threads on the 5e board remind me of a post you (chaochou) made at least a couple of years ago now, pointing out that time constraints in adventures are about pacing and drama-management on the GM side, rather than resource management on the player side, given that the players don't have access to the information about time constraints, and can't control it (eg from the players' point of view it is arbitrary whether or not the GM - as part of managing the living, breathing world - decides that the villains lose a day because they got hung over after a particularly indulgent evening at the Den of Iniquity). To me, this sort of game seems to have lost almost all the elements that a classic dungeon offered for the testing of wargaming, resource management and force deployment skill. [/QUOTE]
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