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Message: <blockquote data-quote="overgeeked" data-source="post: 8586739" data-attributes="member: 86653">Games reward the type of behavior they want to encourage. XP for gold and no XP for killing monsters elicited a particular style of play. XP for showing up, or even not showing up, elicits a completely different style of play. That's 100% mechanics. The more lethal combat rules also taught players to avoid combats in the early days. The...nearly infinitely forgiving combat rules in 5E teach players to be rather gung-ho about getting into fights. You see this in the shift from combat as war to combat as sport. So yeah, the rules of the game push and promote certain styles of play over others. That's basic game design.So what? My experience doesn't need to be representative. It's my experience. I'm not claiming it's the universally applicable experience of all gamers for all times. This is a thread about how D&D has changed over the decades. I'm lamenting things I enjoy falling by the wayside over those decades of change.Well, sometimes they're right. As annoying as they are to listen to. We have actual rule books to look back at and can point to. We have actual numbers and rules to look at and compare. Rolled hit points vs auto max. Rolled stats vs fairly high array. Dead at zero hp vs dead after zero hp and failing three death saves. Healing magic at low levels being costly vs healing magic being ubiquitous throughout. Yep, combat was deadlier back in the day. Yep, combat is less deadly now. That's not a subjective opinion.Sure, but the deck is absurdly stacked in favor of combat. The vast majority of your character sheet is about combat and fighting. Most class abilities are about combat. Most spells are about combat. The rules for combat are explicitly laid out whereas the rules for bypassing are far more...fluid. Granted, the rules for bypassing were fluid back then...but with combat being so much more deadly...and you not earning XP for killing monsters, rather XP for securing gold...it quite dramatically shifted the focus of play away from killing everything toward bypassing encounters. And the more clever your plans were, the more likely they were to succeed. When you succeed by doing a certain thing, you'll try that again. When you try it again...if it fails, you'll try something else...but if it succeeds, you'll keep on trying that. So, if you can succeed by brute forcing your way through things and it always works...you'll default to that approach. Until or unless someone gets bored with it. Gamers optimize the fun out of games. That's just what they do...if the rules permit it.Yes, of course. But with the older style what most often happened was we were played by the factions rather than us playing the factions. Meaning, the goblins were crafty and cunning and saw us as a dangerous tool in their fight against the orcs. So they do their damnedest to use us against the orcs. The goblins are smart enough to know that if they charge in they're weakening both themselves and their enemies. So they don't do that because they're not suicidally stupid. They offer us rewards to go kill the orcs, weakening both us and the orcs, but not themselves...and won't turn their backs on us for a second. The idea of all monsters being too stupid to strategize is just not how we played.</blockquote>

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