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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerricB" data-source="post: 6238113" data-attributes="member: 3586">My AD&D campaign is now over 2 years old, and is still attracting between 6 and 9 players each session at my FLGS. This coming year, I'm intending to go back to weekly play after running it on a fortnightly schedule. Yes, it'll play merry havoc with who is available for each session, but the game has very much developed into a megadungeon crawl, albeit with other matters occasionally impinging themselves on the players.My first experiences with D&D (over 30 years ago, now) were with the AD&D and Moldvay Basic editions, and they've given me a legacy of a few odd DMing tricks and techniques. One of those is the "poke things and see how they work" technique, which is (partly) a version of "Mother, May I?" Yes, I am training my players in mind-reading techniques, with the spur of losing their characters if they choose poorly...This is not strictly true. I very rarely have things to outright kill the players in my dungeons. Discomfit them? All the time, but as a spur for the players to try something else next time. Above all, the name of the game is entertainment, and (at least) the other players will be entertained by the situations their companions create. However, a large part of the entertainment comes for this group from the players trying things to get things to work rather than just rolling dice.I have nothing against rolling dice for mundane activities. Looking for a secret door? Yeah, you can roll dice for that. What I don't want is the ingenuity of the players being lost because everything has dice rolling attached to it. Dice might be used to find the starting point, but in my "old age", I'm moving back towards keeping a lot of the monsters and traps secret, and letting the players learn about them rather than have the assumption that their characters know already.Quite frankly, it was a lot more fun having the magic-user cast lightning bolt on the flesh golem (healing it) rather than just have an arcane check tell him all the immunities and vulnerabilities. Jesse knows better now, and will be prepared the next time he meets a flesh golem - and all the players have stories to tell about that fight. It's not, "And Jesse rolled some dice and pulled out the right spell!" Running the game in this manner has reminded me of a few tricks that I'll likely use in 5E when it comes around.Is this the be-all and end-all of how to run D&D? By no means. The reason that this technique of dealing with knowledge was overhauled in 3E and 4E was because it can cause a lot of problems. "You didn't look up, so you didn't see the massive green slime as you entered the room. Sorry, you're dead!" That isn't fun. Well, I might find it amusing, but I probably wouldn't keep players in the campaign. Discretion is required.There's another advantage to using "poking it" rather than straight dice rolling: When you use player skill rather than character skill, you can keep players engaged even if their characters are otherwise weak in other situations. When exploration tasks use a combination of mechanics and player ingenuity, rather than just mechanics, it opens up another area where everyone who wants to can contribute. Personally, I like the game most when player skill and character skill both contribute to the solution of a problem; I'm not so happy when it's all one or the other. Cheers!</blockquote>

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