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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 5304211" data-attributes="member: 18280">Could well be.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />If a basilisk is wandering around the ruins, it is on the WMT in my game.  Of course, potential indicators are also all around the ruins as well.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I believe that the 1e WMT were intended, at least in part, to give a spur to DMs trying to figure out what to put on each level.  Taken as a whole, though, the Gygaxian approach to monster and treasure placement is not to simply roll on tables.  There is an excellent description of the approach in the 1e DMG, and you do it no justice by imagining that the WMT was the end (or even necessarily the beginning) of that approach.One of the ideas in 1e that has fallen by the wayside in later editions is that some monsters simply occur far less frequently than others.  "A" medusa doesn't have to be "the" medusa of myth, but it is pretty unlikely that a character is going to encounter a plethora of medusae if the DM is populating his milieu following the RAW.I love reading the 1e DMG.  I really, really love Gary's prose.  But I also agree that there were things that were not explained well enough in the books, because they were essentially written for an audience that already knew (or was imagined to know) the basic gist of what Gary was saying.But the major elements in 1e are intended to support each other, and to support a particular style of play.  They do this remarkably well, IMHO.  With the advent of 2e, and then even more so with 3e, though, these elements were either removed or changed without the ramifications being fully understood.  (Again, IMHO.  And working on an SRD-based game designed to play more like certain older games, while taking advantage of later developments I like, I have spent many moons now -- far longer than I thought I would be spending -- determining through playtest and error exactly how these things work together.  Game design makes you appreciate game design, and game revision helps you to see where previous game revisers failed.)I think that many game situations should be exception-based, personally.  In Encounter Area A there is a Free Reaction Reflex save DC 10 to avoid tripping on a loose step.  It applies nowhere else, and I don't have to use the same DC for the poor architecture of another staircase somewhere else.Of course, this might be a result of doing setting design in 3e, where everything seemed to have a set vaule that one should look up (shudder). And, when you do, I'll remind you that you said "4e sucks at classic dungeoncrawling".  Because, IMHO, many of the reasons that this is so are the same reasons why it is less sandbox-friendly than, say, 1e.  But for all of 3e's "back to the dungeon!" I'll certainly admit that 4e has some advantages over 3e for dungeon exploration.RC</blockquote>

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