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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7216083" data-attributes="member: 82106">IME the problem is all this sort of almost arbitrary lethality LEADS to not caring about your characters. I played in the old White Box/Holmes days of D&D that was filled with random encounters with instantly lethal creatures (The Holmes box I bought contained "Monster and Treasure Assortment" and "Dungeon Geomorphs". Thus they were basically telling you to make an endless underground maze filled with random creatures, and of course patrolled by more wandering random creatures. It was pretty deadly. There's a reason people came to simply calling their characters "Dwarf 2" and such. I recall famously my best friend had 'Tribord I' through 'Tribord VII' (I think #s 3 and 7 actually made it through the meat grinder to level 7+ and then he had to try to explain the names). One day when I was bored I generated about 300 sets of 3d6 in order stats on a sheet of paper. I'd just pick the next one and cross it out and transfer it to a character sheet. Last I recall seeing that sheet of paper I'd run through probably 200!!! of them. Probably used a lot for henchmen stats, NPCs, whatever, but I must have chewed through a solid 50 PC stat blocks basically a year or two of playing. So the average PC life-span in 'by the book' classic D&D was on the order of 1-2 weeks (so probably 1 to 4 sessions, as we did play a lot back then). No, death was absolutely not something you feared. It was beyond meaningless. If the character had high stats and good equipment you might apply a bit of extra caution and get yourself some hirelings, etc, maybe even spring for a reserve of cash for a RES once you got rolling (past 3rd level, which wasn't that common). I won't dispute that some cockatrice or whatever wasn't seen as a higher challenge. It COULD be, if it was foreshadowed, outright stated to exist in location X, etc. Truthfully though, unless a monster was completely outrageous there was probably a fairly straightforward way to neuter it, so you could play 'puzzle monster' pretty easily, but it was HARD to play 'plot monster' in classic D&D.</blockquote>

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