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<blockquote data-quote="Andre" data-source="post: 3742603" data-attributes="member: 25930">First off, don't look at the modules. White box OD&amp;D came first - modules came years later. A lot of people played before there were any modules, much less dozens (hundreds).Take a look at the examples in the original rules. I believe there's one paragraph where Gygax describes how a party can - unwittingly - descend several dungeon levels. Since early dungeons were supposed to get deadlier the lower you went, you could easily end up with 2nd-level characters facing 6th-level monsters.To all those who attribute the early killer dungeon style to &quot;bad&quot; GMing, remember - when the game first came out, no one knew how to GM. We muddled through, made every mistake possible (some more than once), and pretty much made it up as we went. And death wasn't always a big deal -certainly not if you were playing a character in his first adventure.I still remember one GM and I discussing how to challenge high-level (11th-14th) characters and we realized that killing them wasn't it - the GM could easily kill them, they would raise dead, rinse and repeat. Challenges became more about the characters' goals - making the characters (players) work for what they wanted, not just killing them. (Which may show that we were finally learning how to GM properly)I'm one of those grognards who remember going into lots of dungeons with 6-8 characters and coming out a hour later with two survivors. We rolled up replacement characters and did it all over again. It wasn't until characters reached about 6th level that deaths declined dramatically (though a TPK could still happen). If you want to know where the idea of random death and destruction, &quot;killer&quot; dungeons, and such came from, just read the original three rulebooks.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Andre, post: 3742603, member: 25930"] First off, don't look at the modules. White box OD&D came first - modules came years later. A lot of people played before there were any modules, much less dozens (hundreds). Take a look at the examples in the original rules. I believe there's one paragraph where Gygax describes how a party can - unwittingly - descend several dungeon levels. Since early dungeons were supposed to get deadlier the lower you went, you could easily end up with 2nd-level characters facing 6th-level monsters. To all those who attribute the early killer dungeon style to "bad" GMing, remember - when the game first came out, [U]no one[/U] knew how to GM. We muddled through, made every mistake possible (some more than once), and pretty much made it up as we went. And death wasn't always a big deal -certainly not if you were playing a character in his first adventure. I still remember one GM and I discussing how to challenge high-level (11th-14th) characters and we realized that killing them wasn't it - the GM could easily kill them, they would raise dead, rinse and repeat. Challenges became more about the characters' goals - making the characters (players) work for what they wanted, not just killing them. (Which may show that we were finally learning how to GM properly) I'm one of those grognards who remember going into lots of dungeons with 6-8 characters and coming out a hour later with two survivors. We rolled up replacement characters and did it all over again. It wasn't until characters reached about 6th level that deaths declined dramatically (though a TPK could still happen). If you want to know where the idea of random death and destruction, "killer" dungeons, and such came from, just read the original three rulebooks. [/QUOTE]

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