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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kronovan" data-source="post: 9772977" data-attributes="member: 6775134">I haven't played in many campaigns recently, where the "GM is out to get you." But it was a different story in my earlier experiences TTRPGing.My first exposure to TTRPGs was playing AD&D1e, for which I played with groups that were under the umbrella of a university War Gaming club. Some of the DMs came from tabletop miniatures war gaming, so combat encounters tended to be quite lethal, with TPKs not uncommon. It was AD&D1e though and to some extent it was expected, but players none the less griped about TPKs happening too often. When a DM TPKd 3 parties in 1 month, crap kinda hit the fan and debates and dialog ensued. Eventually the philosophies of DMing sessions divereged along 2 styles:1) those that favored an overall more narrative approach, in which there was pre-encounter details and even dialog which a party could use to some extent to suss out the danger. There was still the possibility of player death -heck even TPKs- but they were much less frequent. In general, for that group there was more social encounters and less dungeon crawling, which appealed to many players.2) those that favored more lethal encounters, began to run extravagant hex crawls with some top-notch, homebrewed rules. Due to the randomness of rolls which populated hexes and the encounters within them, TPKs became less common. IIRC this happened around the mid 80s when the AD&D Wilderness Survival Guide came out - believe they used it for some ideas.The DMs of the 2nd style were really forced to change, because their table populations were shrinking, while the tables of the 1st style were swelling. We were lucky to have club members very skilled in game development, who had previously brewed up some excellent tabletop miniatures rules - 1 is still played in my city 40+ years later. They were able to apply some of that knowledge to their hexcrawl rules. The initial hexcrawl were marches across Darlene Pekul 's map of Greyhawk's Flanaess, but when TSR started releasing other settings, those maps were crawled across too. When players started to see there was more than death to their campaigns, they started to come back to their tables.</blockquote>

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