NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Flying Toaster" data-source="post: 9715748" data-attributes="member: 7052563">Oops.  Reading comprehension fail. <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="😀" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" title="Grinning face    :grinning:" data-shortname=":grinning:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" /> When I think about my 1980’s B/X and AD&D groups, I remember that we noticed the areas where the rules did not perfectly model real warfare, but after a bit of discussion we would go back to using those rules anyway because we did not really want to pull on those threads and unravel the game.  Even fairly casual players sometimes picked up on these things.  I remember a friend pointing out that at first he tried directing attacks to all of the enemies in order to wound them and slow them down, but he quickly realized that the rules actually rewarded focusing on one enemy until they went down.  I had to agree with him that it did not really make sense that a wounded orc with 1 hp left fought just as well as one with full hp, but adding more realistic rules would have slowed things down, and B/X was already about as much crunch as this player wanted anyway.We house-ruled away the stuff we didn’t enjoy, mostly low-hanging fruit like demi-human level limits and keeping track of “dungeoneering” stuff like light sources and encumbrance (too much like math homework), but we did not try to rewrite the basic rules because it was just too much work and maybe we sensed that we were not really up to the task.  I once got really excited about a Dragon magazine article that introduced hit locations and custom armor pieces.  It might have been all right for big set piece duels, but it slowed ordinary combats to a crawl and I quickly gave up on it.  I don’t think we ever used terms like “immersion” but in actual play nobody ever tried stupid exploits like jumping off cliffs or deliberate friendly fire(balls).  We had fun critiquing the rules during down time, in much the same way that we would critique the “realism” of the action, fantasy, and science fiction movies and TV that we watched, but once the game actually started we just wanted to play.  In the 90’s movies like Clerks had the characters doing that kind of pop culture analysis on-screen and made it mainstream, so I sometimes wonder if it was a hallmark of Generation X, but maybe it was inevitable whenever people stopped to examine their favorite entertainment conventions in detail.  I sometimes toy with the idea of exploring how magic and monsters would affect a “real” fantasy world.  D&D evolved out of Chainmail games that swapped out seige engines like catapults and trebuchets for boulder-hurling giants and fire-breathing dragons.  In the real world people mostly stopped building castles after cannons made stone walls less effective, so maybe magic and monsters explain why D&D worlds are full of ruined castles and baddies holed up in underground dungeons.  But earth elementals and other tunneling monsters might make dungeons obsolete too, so I don’t know where the fantasy arms race ends.</blockquote>

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