Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 8586592" data-attributes="member: 6799660">Whether people 'played smarter' bitd is always going to be a discussion fraught with issues. In particular, it has threads of the, 'no, see, we're the actual smart nerds, unlike you guys' within-group posturing that seems so prevalent in nerd culture and threads of the 'back in my day, we walked to school uphill both ways' that happens with any endeavor that exists across decades.  Suffice to say, there were people that were awfully clever in their gaming back then, and plenty enough who do so now. I think the notion that the system of old school D&D actually incentivized being clever is... well, mostly true only in that there wasn't all that many other levers to pull... for non-casters... and before people had lots of magic items... and assuming you include negotiating with monsters (which is hard to call clever when it is described right in the dungeon-crawl procedure section)... and (once you get to this many caveats, obviously there's going to be a lot of YMMV). I mean, obviously if defeating monsters doesn't garner you xp you will look for opportunities to bypass fights, but that's just minimally 'being smart.' When I first heard this adage about early gaming, I imagined playing smart was some kind of Oceans 11/Mission Impossible heist, complete with crawling through ductwork and stuff. However, having now met with the early gamers when both of us were adults (as opposed to when I started in '83 when they were scary grownups), it seems it was more about 'duck down this passage and let the guards pass by.' Everyone's experience is going to vary, of course. Enchanting items ran headlong into the Con sacrifice, and often ended up something that NPC casters did, but not the PCs. It also highlights that the game had wildly different uses for money based on whether you were name level or not --the fighter having a use for their gold too.... at least if you did the leader/general route. That's one of those 'it stands to reason' moments that is true if you try to square the circle on a D&D world's economy, but it by no means was a truism in-game. Plenty of DMs followed the 'can sell magic items' rules* without making a commensurate way of buying them. Exact reasoning will have differed, but predominantly (IMO) based on the conceit that you were supposed to go diving into the dungeons to get the treasure*which was something of a requirement, if you used the level-up training rules, as you always would be just a little GP poor when you hit the XP point for level-up.</blockquote>

Verification