NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8626845" data-attributes="member: 82106">No, but honestly if you look at the (mostly fragmentary) accounts of early GMs, there's a strong 'Quest Element' there. I mean, you didn't delve into Greyhawk (unless maybe you were a level 1 newb) without some sort of goals and ideas of what you were doing, and that might well be motivated by concepts of characterization that were invented. So, maybe a PC acquires a sister because of some earlier plot hook, and now it might well be that there's an item he needs in order to save her. Or etc. I mean, this was not the central agenda maybe, but I think its apparent to me, from playing back then (though not with guys like Gygax) that this was a fairly common element. At some point I can remember that I started making dungeons where the rooms were concocted mostly on the fly to address things the players said or did at the table, etc. Also you could at least in theory have a fixed dungeon that tested the character. We never quite got to the idea of testing intent, not like Edwards and others did in the 90's. You COULD though, I mean, would D&D really fight that very much? Old D&D had few actual resolution mechanics, just saves and attack/damage rolls, plus various reasonably formalized exploration mechanics. The only other thing that was KINDA there were ability checks.So. What if you played something that used OD&D mechanics, or lets say Holmes Basic and you asked players what they were intending to accomplish when they tried something. You could then ask for an ability check (or it might be one of the other existing types of die roll) and use it to gauge that, complete with fail-forward and some notion of 'twists' and such. I don't think that game will fight you. I think that was the point of the comment in DW about "World of Dungeons", that D&D's original mechanics were so simple and ad-hoc that you really could play something like that. Now, how would that play out in a Megadungeon? That I'm not sure, but you could, for example, focus on specifics. Maybe you really key in on the cleric's relationship with his deity, for instance. I think your dungeon would have to be a lot less outright deadly than the typical design too, but that could be more color than anything (IE the PCs just go deeper, things still often go wrong eventually). You might need to pick a strong theme too, like the dungeon is really a testing grounds, that sort of thing.</blockquote>

Verification