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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kannik" data-source="post: 8584398" data-attributes="member: 984">I think there are still plenty of mechanical challenges, even if the resource-management ones have been reduced.  Hit Point loss and death is still quite possible, it's just less swingy.  There's also hit points as a resource to be taxed, exhaustion levels, and plenty of failures from  failed skill rolls.  Now, the latter might suffer you from a narrative perspective (in that you fail to achieve your aim in the moment), but given you are using the dice I still categorize it as a mechanical challenge.  However, the crux remains here that even if narrative challenges were all that remained the game would still be challenging.  Following your observations, if people are more invested in their character and the story than they "should" be, then a narrative failure would be more devastating than a mechanical one.  Again, I invited to consider that "less resource management challenges" does not equal "easy mode forever."  If you say no thank you, then alright.  (And to be clear, I am not doing the reverse or saying that resourced based management and easy lethality are not challenging or vapid or denigrating the playstyle.  Clearly not, given the bit I wrote about I3-I5.(  Well, that's fine and dandy if you ignore what is written, but at least acknowledge that you are doing so when making sweeping "D&D has always been X" type statements.  "I know Gary said this, and the rules indicate that, but my groups always played it like such and that's the (only?) way I can think about it."As for whether AD&D was gamist or stimulationist, I think we need to remember the context of the time.  Coming from a wargaming background and hence perspective, which highly tended towards simulation, even a little bit of gamism can feel quite extensive.  Gary likely felt this was quite gamist, even if he indulged in what he loved from the wargaming side of things with his collection of Bohemian earspoons.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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