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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9370789" data-attributes="member: 7026594">It was always described as a guideline for the standard dungeon style play, intended to help players make smart decisions and play the "press your luck" game.  But the encounter tables also easily allow you to encounter more deadly monsters from the more dangerous levels of the dungeon, even if you're sticking to the easier levels, so it's clearly not intended as a concrete rule that you can't encounter a higher level monster on a lower level dungeon level.And it's pretty clear that it was never intended as a constraint to creative adventures designed to be played differently than the standard multi-level dungeon crawl.  Steading of the Hill Giant Chief was the first module TSR published, after all!  The first two modules ever published were Jaquays' F'Chelrak's Tomb and Wee Warriors' Palace of the Vampire Queen.  As far as I can tell PotVQ does function with higher dungeon levels getting more difficult (though you start at the ground level and work your way up), but F'Chelrak's tomb doesn't function that way.So in practice we don't see that it narrowed the options for adventure design, when you look at published examples from the period, at least."not quite at your hand" seems like a serious understatement when we're talking about being able to start it at least 90' distant from yourself in all cases, and farther as you gain in levels!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />1E is not clear about that.  A lot of folks (Lanefan has attested his group being among them) interpreted it as being hit twice (ie: double damage), and treated that as an advantage of the spell over Fireball, which is the same level but covers a much larger area.  2E did change the spell description to explicitly work the way you're describing, but then, 2E also caps both spells at 10d6, so 2E in general was down-powering some spells.Every Encumbrance rule in every edition has the same issue of having arbitrary break points where you pick up one more dagger or coin and now you're suddenly slowed.  This is just the nature of the beast.The break points on the categories are, AFAIK just arbitrarily chosen to match standardized movement rates.  I supposed one could do a calculation with a calculator or slide rule (or longhand on paper!) to proportionally reduce movement speed based on what percentage of your maximum weight carried you're currently toting, but that seems a bit annoying and impractical.  Every time you pick up or put something down doing the calculation again?  "Ok, I with the loot from the last room my movement rate is now 25.6'/rd!"As Snarf pointed out, the 1E MM says this is the monster's "characteristic bent".  I read that as synonymous with "typical inclination".  We're talking about abstractions covering broad groups.  It seems obvious to me that there will always be exceptions to such descriptions unless they're explicitly ruled out.</blockquote>

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