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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pamphylian" data-source="post: 9750995" data-attributes="member: 7053769">I totally buy that what you call the “survivalist skin” was always subservient to the combat gameplay loop at most tables most of the time - I certainly can’t speak from history (I wasn’t there) but that is my sense from reading the rules and playing early editions. “Combat is a failure state” taken fully literally* doesn’t really match my experience of most D&D sessions of whatever edition (with the exception of a few very memorable ones)That being said, I think this skin not being the central element of gameplay does not imply that it was vestigial-on-purpose from the outset. Whenever I’ve played with a functional version of the “survivalist skin” and taken it seriously, my dungeon delving experiences are almost always richer, from either side of the table. No one element (light, time, food, money, wandering monsters) is essential to consider at all times, but collectively, these elements add weight to player decisions, the bread and butter of rpgs, because they are now embedded in a system of cause and effect beyond just the individual combat encounter/trap/puzzle. Stripping out the scaffolding, the matrix of time and resource management, from the monster fighting puts most of the responsibility for risk and tension within a given isolated combat, rather than in broader strategic decision making.I think this explains a lot of the current style of dungeon design, a mostly linear sequence of carefully designed and balanced, often hermetically sealed combat encounters (a style that reaches its apotheosis in Pathfinder 2e). The ideal contribution of the survivalist skin (and in my experience, often the reality) is that players start thinking above the level of the encounter, about the dungeon or dungeon level as a whole.** The monster fighting fundamentals by themselves can feel a bit impoverished on their own, by comparison. I can understand why a surprising number of modern D&D players say that they find Dungeon crawls (half of the titular Ds, at least!) boring! They frequently no longer have the supporting infrastructure that imbues them with much additional tension and consequence.*I don’t think it’s originator meant it fully literally, but it is sometimes taken as such** I am using dungeon in a pretty broad sense, any interconnected location full of risk and rewardAs I understand my proposals, my argument is that folks who prefer differently won't have to adjust! The systems they already don't interact with still won't have to be interacted with, they'll just now work for those who want to interact with them. I suppose some responses in this thread suggest that some tables do infact get value specifically out of these things not working but still existing in their non functional form (e.g. players loving to say they have darkvision when the DM says its dark) - I still optimistically, maybe delusionally, think with a little bit of thought and modularity all of these varied preferences can be accommodated in a single system, and that we can have our cake and eat it too.It's kind of interesting that this particular maybe rather narrow vision of heroic fantasy has become so dominant to be the genre D&D is designed for, since I don't think this was always the case. Considering a broader "adventure" genre to draw from, just thinking about film, we have gameable elements in what you might call gritty survivalist threats in everything from Indiana Jones (with a scene where the last torch literally burns out) to Dune (with its prominent survival elements) to the Mummy (a bit of both).</blockquote>

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