Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pming" data-source="post: 7292234" data-attributes="member: 45197">Hiya!I'd also like to add, specifically because you (OP) mentioned his players checking "everything". With "old school play", which 1e most certainly is...it's kind of the base of what old school play is... when a player says "I search", the DM is expecting the details. Players that fail to give details are, at lest for how I DM, assumed to be doing it quickly and without any serious care. For example, "I search the bed". I would assume the PC walks directly over to it, drops to his knees and looks underneath, then throws back the pillows, then the blankets/sheets, then flips the mattress or starts to rummage through whatever the bedding is. If there is a poisonous snake under the blankets I would give it automatic surprise and thusly a free attack/s.With 1e, the key method of discovering stuff is the player's choice of actions and description of where/how/with what. With 3e and later this was pretty much reduced to "We search the room", everyone makes a Perception/Investigation roll, DM consults various DC's for the three things of note in the room, and announces "You guys find a silver brooch hidden in the pocket of one of the coats in the ogres bed of refuse". That would never happen in 1e. There were no real 'skills' in 1e (Proficiencies came to 1e in the Dungeoneers and Wilderness survival guides; there were "Secondary Skills" in the DMG a DM/Player could use to give a 'job' the character had before turning to a life of an adventurer...but they were vague, like "Farmer", or "Carpenter"). Because there were no 'skills', how successful a group was at finding the hidden treasures, or avoiding encounters, or overcoming an obstacle was almost entirely based on the PLAYERS skill at play...NOT the characters.So what the OP's group did...spend two hours searching a room...could be very much Old School Style; unless that was spent making roll after roll after roll after roll on Skills or Stats, hoping to simply beat a DC. In other words "I'll search the floor. I got a 14"..."Nothing? Ok, I'll search the edge where the floor and south wall meets. I got a 17"..."Nothing? Ok, how about the North wall? I got a 13...then the West, 19 and East 23! Anything?". If that was closer to the 'searching', then yeah..."you're doing it wrong" (from a 1e/old school perspective).I've ran the Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan about...three, maybe 4 times. Twice I used the "tournament rules". Very effective at motivating the players to 'get out' rather than 'explore'. The other time(s) was very much exploration...and always very evocative! One thing that C1 does is have a very distinctive style and flavour to it (the whole aztec/mayan thing). Love running it! Probably run it again some day. <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=":)" />^_^Paul L. Ming</blockquote>

Verification