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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 8444221" data-attributes="member: 6670763">I've been there since I was 30. And it certainly was a contributing factor for why I got fed up with Dungeons & Dragons. Last year I ended up running a 5th edition game for the first time, and while it was the best campaign I've ever run by far, the way that the rules wants you to hack people and creatures in endless numbers was the main reason why I decided to conclude the campaign after the first story arc, even though the players would absolutely have been up to continuing to another adventure.Oddly enough, the solution to that problem, which I had been oggling at for a long time before that campaign, is the 1981 Basic/Expert edition of D&D, which is designed even more as a straightforward dungeon crawler than any other edition, except the very first version. They key about that game is that it is designed from top to bottom as an exploration and treasure stealing game, not as a combat system with a diplomacy skill tacked on.It is a game in which characters die much more easily than in any editions from the last 30 years, but I don't see that as a problem, but as a key component of what makes the game work. With characters consisting only of the most basic stats (attributes, attack bonus, hit points, saves), they are inherently more replaceable, and as such the game does not become about individuals and their personal stories. Instead it naturally tends much more towards a focus on cool and tense things happening in this one scene, and the overall memorable exploits of the players, with the specific characters in the party coming and going. It encourages to make characters who live fast and expect to die young. If you don't have the expectation that you go into the game to see your character becoming a character with a long and deep personal story that develops over 30 adventures, then the death of characters becomes much less of a disruption of the campaign an instead a part of how the game is played.But the real charm lies in that the game is full of structures and interwoven systems that keep producing obstacles for the characters in which the question is not which of your characters' special abilities will kill the monsters the fastest. Fighting monsters offers very little gain for the PCs, while it poses very considerable risk, even if it looks like an easy fight. Where you get your XP and wealth from is the treasures that are hidden somewhere in the monster's lair. So many things about this game are incentives for the players to avoid getting into fights. As you head to the dungeon with all the supplies you'll be needing, you want to make it quick and avoid losing any people or potions before you even reach the destination. At the dungeon, your concern is how to separate the monsters from their treasures. Killing the monster is always an option but also always risky. Any way to get the treasure without monsters making attack rolls is preferable. And then you have to get back to a town while being slowed down with all the treasure, and you really want to get there as fast as possible to avoid running into anything on the way that could still kill you, or steal your treasures before you get XP for them. You could calculate how much food and water you need for the return trip and which tools you will need for the obstacles along the way, and then ditch all the supplies you can buy new for cheap and would only slow you down. But it could be that one unfortunate random encounter overthrows the whole plan and you could really use the tools you decided to leave behind.Trying to avoid fighting monsters and people is fun, if the rules reward you for pulling it off.Another thing I started a few years ago is to no longer have humanoid monsters. There are still various different peoples, but they are not good races and evil races. And it made me realize how common it is in adventures to have a bunch of generic evil people just because the game structure demands that you have a lot of fights. Imagine you replace all orcs, goblins, kobolds, ogers, and so on with human tribesmen in a typical adventure. Suddenly it all looks incredibly messed up. Sure, there certainly are some really bad people among the barbarians living in the hills. But when the adventures assume that you will kill every single person you'll encounter, generally on sight, that just isn't right.In all encounters with humanoids, I always do the test "Would this encounter work with humans"? You can always make them bandits, but it often very quickly turns into completely ridiculous amounts of bandits if you assume they are all human bandits.</blockquote>

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