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Taking the "Dungeons" out of D&D
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<blockquote data-quote="Greg Benage" data-source="post: 8085899" data-attributes="member: 93631"><p>I haven't looked at GLOG, if that's what you mean. OTOH, I played a metric ton of B/X. The entire chapter "The Adventure" is four pages, and that covers everything from party composition to awarding experience. The rules on time-keeping are super-simple: in a turn, you can move and map an area equal to your movement rate, search a 10x10 area, thief can search for traps, rest, or loot. And still those rules were ignored in favor of handling it more naturalistically. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I mean everyone. When I played tournament events at GenCon, the DMs didn't use most of that stuff. When I went to college in 1985, I started playing with the gaming club every week. The DM was a professional grad student who'd been playing since he was an undergrad in 1974. Like, he had a megadungeon under a castle, mapped on those huge blotter-size sheets of graph paper. You show up, create a 1st level character, you can play...though you may be running with 7th and 8th level characters. Parties were always in double digits, plus henchmen and retainers. It was <em>old-school</em>. And even <em>he </em>didn't use most of those game structures, even though it probably would have helped tremendously in organizing that kind of game. We didn't use a caller, either, though in retrospect it probably would have been a good idea. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin :D" data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></p><p></p><p>I never asked why, precisely because not using them seemed "normal" to me. I probably didn't even think about it at the time. In hindsight, I'd <em>guess </em>he gave in to players wanting to "break" the rules: "I don't want to search a whole 10x10 area; how long just to search under the bed and in the desk?" To the extent the game is all about "you can do anything," players are going to resist robust game structures. If there's a more naturalistic way to handle something, actual play will usually drift in that direction. IMO and IME.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Greg Benage, post: 8085899, member: 93631"] I haven't looked at GLOG, if that's what you mean. OTOH, I played a metric ton of B/X. The entire chapter "The Adventure" is four pages, and that covers everything from party composition to awarding experience. The rules on time-keeping are super-simple: in a turn, you can move and map an area equal to your movement rate, search a 10x10 area, thief can search for traps, rest, or loot. And still those rules were ignored in favor of handling it more naturalistically. I mean everyone. When I played tournament events at GenCon, the DMs didn't use most of that stuff. When I went to college in 1985, I started playing with the gaming club every week. The DM was a professional grad student who'd been playing since he was an undergrad in 1974. Like, he had a megadungeon under a castle, mapped on those huge blotter-size sheets of graph paper. You show up, create a 1st level character, you can play...though you may be running with 7th and 8th level characters. Parties were always in double digits, plus henchmen and retainers. It was [I]old-school[/I]. And even [I]he [/I]didn't use most of those game structures, even though it probably would have helped tremendously in organizing that kind of game. We didn't use a caller, either, though in retrospect it probably would have been a good idea. :D I never asked why, precisely because not using them seemed "normal" to me. I probably didn't even think about it at the time. In hindsight, I'd [I]guess [/I]he gave in to players wanting to "break" the rules: "I don't want to search a whole 10x10 area; how long just to search under the bed and in the desk?" To the extent the game is all about "you can do anything," players are going to resist robust game structures. If there's a more naturalistic way to handle something, actual play will usually drift in that direction. IMO and IME. [/QUOTE]
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