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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AaronOfBarbaria" data-source="post: 6714372" data-attributes="member: 6701872">What I find very interesting is that most of the BECMI modules I have read and run involve constant mention of tactics like 1 of 3 guards taking off to warn another 6 guards some stuff is going down, or mentioning that making noise in an area that monsters are hanging out near will draw their attention 50% of the time (most recently it was saying roll 1d6, and each result from 1 to 3 was a different monster that decided to check out the noise, with 4-6 being no monster deciding to investigate), making the map distances actually make some sense with how the encounters are set up.The issues I ran into with old-school modules were always more along the lines of realistic or near realistic dimensions used for structures and their maps, but those dimensions not meshing well with using minis on the table because the 9 trolls sprawled on the stack of mattresses in center that 40' x 30' barracks building leaves nowhere to put the PC minis besides standing outside the door.It was the modules in 3rd edition and 4th edition, with exceptions here and there, which I kept running into brain scratchers like one carefully balanced encounter of duergar fighting the party, and one more carefully balanced encounter of duergar literally just waiting on the other side of a door immediately adjacent to the spaces in which a dwarven PC and the duergar he was locked in a fight to the death with stood fighting. Like, what, did they just peek out the door at their friends getting murdered and think "nah, we'd better not be rude, best to wait our turn. Our friends won't curse us from the afterlife for it."When I ran Lost Mines of Phandelver, I wasn't paying attention... don't recall one way or the other whether the space presented and the monsters behavior within it made sense.Anyways, what I have done to solve the issue is, when faced with an offending module that I'm not already intentionally having the party over-level for to handle such issues as compounded encounters, is just stretch the scale of corridors wherever possible (usually taking a 1 square = 5 foot to 4 times that for passageway length, while leaving width and most room sizes unchainged), and include drunken or heavily distracted activity otherwise explaining what would appear to be "I didn't want to see if what sounded like my friend/coworker dying was actually that happening, even though it is my job to do that and benefits my chance of survival too," type behavior.</blockquote>

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