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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7215036" data-attributes="member: 4937">Compared to me, some of the other DMs I knew were much more generous with treasure and so forth.  But they were really going for a deliberate 'high heroic' style campaign, and they were playing in the Forgotten Realms which had very much pushed NPC's into that territory.  I wouldn't call it 'Monty Haul' though as it was a very skilled group with a very high degree of system mastery (not that we had even the term 'system mastery' at the time).   But the general idea that players should be doing everything allowed by the rules to bend the game to their advantage was assumed.Let's put it this way; when I was DM we also applied the weapon vs. AC modifiers.   I haven't actually mentioned anything I'd consider an obscure rule yet, nor were the rules on magic resistance obscure to us.  An actual obscure rule might be what modifiers are applied to a character that undertakes a forced march.It was barely a thing, but if you dug a bit, the intention of it as an aid to knowing what sort of creatures to throw at PC's of what levels can be dug out.  For example, a Type V at 3000XP is a level VIII monster, and so is a lethal challenge to a 6th level party and should not be encountered before 6th level.   It is a fair challenge to an 8th level party, and at higher levels multiple type V's will be needed to provide a suitable challenge.CR formalized this in 3e, but you can with some digging around in multiple books figure out both what Gygax was thinking and how he thought it was supposed to work, and even figure out where CR and EL came from.Agreed.  But the point is, a fighter with 18 Con has nearly twice the survivability of one with 14 Con, so if you find yourself playing a fighter with 14 Con eventually you realize that this is a dead end.  You are wasting your time on a character with very low potential in the long run.   So by all means, you need to kill this character off and try again.  Low strength can be offset by obtaining magical items like girdles, but very low Con means you either shouldn't have built a fighter or should not be treating this as a primary character. I call that out in my essay as to why the Type V, even though its otherwise a very formidable and well designed monster, is pointless facing off against a high level party.  With just 7+7 HD, they go down like chumps, and even with 7 attacks won't hit much or hard enough against a party that has AC's in practice between -3 and -8.   Now, as I point out at the end of the essay, this sort of monster is a perfect one to double the HD to create a suitable challenge.  A 14+14 HD Type V with a retinue of mooks does make a suitable encounter.The published modules set one standard for how much magic a campaign should have.  It's a lot, as has been well documented before.  Games like that would end up with high level parties covered with high end gear.  A second standard comes from the DMG on how to build a dungeon.   It results in somewhat less gear and treasure.   The treasure types on the other hand as extremely conservative and when you actually do the math, if you strictly use the treasure types magic is very rare.Yep.</blockquote>

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