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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 8518457" data-attributes="member: 6799660">I think OP is inadvertently throwing in some value statements in an attempt at a little cheeky humor. I suspect what they were actually trying to do was convey how previous editions have been marketed by cultural myth and zeitgeist (and note that their own experience was either the same, different, or nonexistant-but-here's-what-we-did-with-them-after-the-fact). Certainly certain aspects of discussing oD&D and BX/BECMI (including in some previous 'how did early gaming really play out?'-style threads here ) have suggested that characters in that era were often relatively interchangeable (e.g. the ubiquitous story of 'M. Elf->Melf'), and that there was often mere lip service as to why the traps&treasure-filled dungeons existed or why the characters were attempting them. It's certainly worth discussing, although I think OP could work on the initial post some more to make it read better.Here is my take on all of them -- we didn't. Whatever the games supposedly were or weren't, we either didn't get them or didn't care about them. Was 2e 'about' large, epic stories narrated by the DM? We didn't notice. Whatever expectations or incentivizations* a given ruleset supposedly created, we noped out of them without any conscious decision to do so. 2e was much like BX for us -- you started off adventuring in dungeons because the wandering monster charts in the wilderness were killer for 1st level PCs (and because Dungeon is right there in the game name), and somewhere around name level we got interested in keeps and castles and ruleship for a hot minute (with wilderness adventure at some point in the middle), before hoping off that project (possibly leaving a retainer in charge of the barony or whatever, possibly just abandoning it) to do inter-planar adventures until people got bored or the gaming group collapsed under changing schedules. Epic stories happened or did not based on whether the DM was competent enough a storyteller to do such a thing, not what edition we played. Character personality was likewise based on player investment, not rules incentivization (although DMs who make resurrections plausible is necessary for investment in individual characters in many of them). *The whole oD&D as heist-movie thing, in particular, seems to be something we didn't catch at all. Yes, in retrospect that is what the harsh combat and GP=XP setup reward, but man was that not obvious at age 8.</blockquote>

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