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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bullgrit" data-source="post: 5073557" data-attributes="member: 31216">Yep. It’s been stated many times that rolling dice for a search is “new school,” (it challenges the character), whereas having the Players exactly describe what and how they search is “old school,” (it challenges the Player). Reference a recent thread:<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/270458-silver-baton-torch-stub-t1.html" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/270458-silver-baton-torch-stub-t1.html</a>Specific posts in that thread:<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/270458-silver-baton-torch-stub-t1.html#post5055019" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/270458-silver-baton-torch-stub-t1.html#post5055019</a><a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/270458-silver-baton-torch-stub-t1.html#post5055031" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/270458-silver-baton-torch-stub-t1.html#post5055031</a>And I’ve never disagreed with this concept, this qualification of “new school” vs. “old school”. (Although I have disagreed with some over which was actually the better method.) This is a difference I’ve always seen with older vs. newer editions of the game. In my experiences playing classic D&D during the era of classic D&D, it was always expected that the Players describe their searches. There were no die rolls for a search unless the module specifically gave such a rule for a certain instance. Something like, “If the party searches the statue, they have a 50% chance of noticing X.”Well, first off, rolling a die to search for treasure is a house rule to BD&D. Good or bad idea, it’s not in the rules as written. The only things the rules mention rolling for a search are secret doors and traps – and you specifically have to be looking in the right place to even get the roll. If you base a roll-to-search-for-treasure house rule on those written rules, (rolling a 1 on 1d6), finding the treasure is more based on pure luck than on Player skill or even character skill. (And what even moderately greedy Player is going to leave finding gp and xp up to a 1 in 6 chance?)But even if a good house rule could be created, I was running this BD&D game session strictly on the rules as written. (Granted, I did “houserule” that troglodyte attack so as to avoid killing another PC. This probably makes me a wuss DM. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" /> Had I instituted any house rules for this run, I’m sure people would be coming in this thread to tell me how I ran the game wrong, and thereby didn’t give my Players a true classic BD&D experience.As for how long we played vs. how much of the dungeon they covered: Again, had they gone to a more room-populated area of the dungeon (rather than the maze of corridors), they probably would have explored more rooms. The southwestern part of the dungeon has just 3 numbered areas. Compare to the southeastern part of the dungeon – 12 rooms!Maybe my group has more non-game table talk. Maybe my group is just generally slower. I didn’t feel that we were wasting a lot of time, or going particularly slow. I mean, we only played the dungeon for about 3 hours. (And remember, they spent some of that time restocking between forays, and rolling up two new PCs to replace dead ones.) We could have squeezed another hour of play time in by starting earlier, or playing later. I could have had the Players generate their characters before the game session, but I felt that creating the characters at the table is part of the classic D&D play experience.This one-game-session experience has taught me a valuable lesson about any RPG: You can’t get a full feel for the game with just one game session. You can’t get a full feel of even just a single adventure with just one game session. I really should have gotten everyone’s agreement to play the full dungeon, and not just one game session. But this was at least the third time I’ve offered to run this BD&D game to this group – I was happy to at last get agreement on one game session.As for mazes in dungeons – I agree with the consensus here: they usually aren’t a good idea, or usually aren’t designed very well. It’s a wonder, though, that so many published classic D&D modules had mazes of one sort or another. (How long before someone takes issue with this claim that many classic D&D modules had mazes?)The idea to give D&D4 a try had nothing to do with us giving BD&D a try (with good or bad result). No more than our giving Alternaty a try had anything to do with our giving Star Wars d6 a try, or giving Paranoia a try had anything to do with giving Marvel Super Heroes a try. We regularly try new games, and new editions of games. We’ve talked about trying D&D4 for a long while, but I said I wasn’t willing to run it myself – I wasn’t interested enough in it to learn it enough to run a game. One of the other players in our group has offered to DM an adventure.Bullgrit</blockquote>

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