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<blockquote data-quote="Sacrosanct" data-source="post: 8364406" data-attributes="member: 15700">Yep.&nbsp; Anecdotal evidence =/= evidence, and it's something people get tripped up about all the time.&quot;Older editions were more lethal&quot;&quot;Not in my experience, so no they weren't.&quot;<img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="🤷‍♂️" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f937-2642.png" title="Man shrugging&nbsp; &nbsp; :man_shrugging:" data-shortname=":man_shrugging:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />People, as a whole, tend to play a game the way it was mechanically designed for the most part.&nbsp; And there are so many mechanical and design features of old school D&amp;D that resulted in higher lethality compared to modern editions, that it should go without argument that the versions back then were more lethal.&nbsp; It would be like saying &quot;The NSX is faster than an Accord&quot; and replying with &quot;In my experience we drove the NSX slower on the roads than the Accord, so no it's not.&quot; or &quot;You could drive the NSX slower than the Accord as it's up to the driver, so no it's not.&quot;I don't think it should be forgotten that in the early days, many of the &quot;gotcha&quot; things in the game, like mimics, green slimes, rust monsters, rot grubs, etc were created specifically as a way to defeat PCs who overcame previous things in the game.&nbsp; The design approach back then, because it was based on a wargame and RPGs were new, was &quot;the players figured out how to beat these challenges, so lets invent some new ones to beat them until they figure that out too.&quot;&nbsp; I.e., it was still viewed as a competitive game where ideas like fail forward were not thought of.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Sacrosanct, post: 8364406, member: 15700"] Yep. Anecdotal evidence =/= evidence, and it's something people get tripped up about all the time. "Older editions were more lethal" "Not in [I]my [/I]experience, so no they weren't." 🤷‍♂️ People, as a whole, tend to play a game the way it was mechanically designed for the most part. And there are [I]so many[/I] mechanical and design features of old school D&D that resulted in higher lethality compared to modern editions, that it should go without argument that the versions back then were more lethal. It would be like saying "The NSX is faster than an Accord" and replying with "In my experience we drove the NSX slower on the roads than the Accord, so no it's not." or "You could drive the NSX slower than the Accord as it's up to the driver, so no it's not." I don't think it should be forgotten that in the early days, many of the "gotcha" things in the game, like mimics, green slimes, rust monsters, rot grubs, etc were created specifically as a way to defeat PCs who overcame previous things in the game. The design approach back then, because it was based on a wargame and RPGs were new, was "the players figured out how to beat these challenges, so lets invent some new ones to beat them until they figure that out too." I.e., it was still viewed as a competitive game where ideas like fail forward were not thought of. [/QUOTE]

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