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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Consonant Dude" data-source="post: 5810028" data-attributes="member: 6688791">I wouldn't know about OD&D, never played that. But I started playing  in 1980 and used various old school editions of DnD and I have  continued to do so for over 30 years. I'm not flashing "geek creds"  here. I don't think there's anything mind-boggling about this and  there's plenty of folks who started then and some even before me. But I  do think some people exaggerate how primordial the style of play you  describe was to early DnD. What you describe as "exploration" is ONE iconic style of DnD play among  many others. Its early preeminence has more to do with how the game  grew an audience than anything else.See, when we started playing my friend and I, we had nobody to teach us.  So we learned by ourselves. We basically flipped a coin to decide who  would DM. It was very clear to us that DMing was an immense  responsibility cause, you were in charge of the whole world as opposed  to players who took one responsibility, being a cool protagonist. Fortunately, DnD had a basic mechanism for that: the dungeoncrawl. The dungeoncrawl was not cool because you were advancing at a slow pace  and counting how many torches were left. The dungeoncrawl was cool  because it solved a lot of headaches for the DM. You buy a module and  you have this restricted environment. The toughest part is motivating  your players to explore the dungeon but once that's done, they can  "screw up" your world. They can't say they want to go to some other  village you haven't created, or cross the other side of the river you  have no map for. Whether they turn left or right, you have AN ANSWER. So they were easy to create for TSR and easy to run for newbie DMs  (which we all were). My friend and I initiated well over a hundred  players during our elementary and high school years. As we gained experience as DM, we would make our own "modules". They  would be dungeoncrawls at first but over time they would involve more  and more stuff that had nothing to do with crawling with torches. Of course, many of those people we initiated eventually wanted to try  their hand at DMing. So they look for a place to start. They would try  and find a module we hadn't run that had the simplest kind of setup  possible. You guessed it: a dungeoncrawl. I also don't buy that high heroism is a threat to dungeoncrawling.  Ironically, if there is anything that is a dungeoncrawl-stopper, it's  grittiness. For instance, once we started playing around with other  systems like Fantasy Hero, Harnmaster, etc... we discovered we couldn't  run the type of dungeoncrawls we used to because the characters were way  too battered. It's a myth that systems empowering characters prevent "exploration" as  you define it, because that exploration is very much about trial and  error. And if error means you have to start from scratch too often, it  doesn't take long before it's pointless. See? These old monsters were amazing because the game was new to many of  us back then. It's got NOTHING to do with core rules and principles.  It's about the fluff. People have found memories of the owlbear because back then, when they  were introduced to it, they had no idea what was going on. They might  not have known the troll regenerated and so on. But today, we're screwed because the only way we can recapture that  magic of discovery is by having new monsters, except whenever "old  schoolers" (and I use the term loosely because it seems a lot of those  weren't around at the time or have greatly distorted memories) see new  stuff, they complain it's not iconic and not in tune with the original  flavor.Do I think exploration is bad? No. But the way to capture it is in  adventure building, much more so than in the core rules. You pick a DnD  system, you build really cool adventures with great puzzles and  wonderful creatures and you let your PCs try stuff. And a system too  unforgiving tends to make the process a little silly. I still run dungeoncrawls, BTW. But there are so many other styles of  DnD gaming and they were all possible and played back in 1980. And  they're all equally iconic.</blockquote>

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