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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jackelope King" data-source="post: 3757403" data-attributes="member: 31454">First and foremost, you didn't come across as if you were preaching, so no worries there.I think the difference in points of view here is that for your style of gameplay, a character is merely a vehicle with which the player can explore a fantastic (and dangerous) area. You don't get emotionally invested in your car. Oh sure, you might give it a name and personify it a little when things go good or bad, but for the most part, it's just a vehicle. If it breaks down, you just get a new one and keep on truckin'. It's the journey that matters, the one that the player experiences, and the characters just facilitate that.I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum. For me, what's exciting is seeing how different characters would react to a fantastic (and dangerous) area. For me, it's more than just a car: it's a car I've spent hours tweaking and tuning so that it runs just the way I want. I've got custom plates and a flashy paint-job that really makes it definitively different from everyone else's. And it runs differently than, say, a muscle car or a pick-up truck or a bulldozer on the journey. It's more than "just a car"... it's a labor of love.And this, I think, is where I find myself disliking dungeon crawls. In a dungeon, the range of challenges to a character are reduced. There won't be as many opportunities to see how a character will react to achieving or failing at a dream, or interacting with someone of a different culture, or even just dealing with a troubled family. Those are more interesting to me than a dungeon delve. Emphasis on the "to me".There's always room for more than one approach. However, I feel as though the older rules (and the culture surrounding it) tended to make characters seem more disposable than in 3e (and presumably in 4e and so on and so forth). When characters are somewhat disposable, there's less of a backlash against a DM who offs them, and there were indeed dungeons designed off of this principle (Tomb of Horrors, for instance), where getting a character through it alive so that he could go on to other adventures and develop emotionally wasn't the goal... the goal was to get your game piece (the PC) through it alive for the bragging rights.These days, it seems like this approach has fallen into disfavor because players have a greater investment in characters than they did under "roll 3d6 six times and arrange as you like, pick a class, get your gear, roll for hit points". Backgrounds and personalities are encouraged. It's something that I personally enjoy, and it's something that makes "old-school" killer dungeons more difficult to justify.</blockquote>

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