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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KesselZero" data-source="post: 5864209" data-attributes="member: 6689976">Dear Grognards, How do you play old school? I understand the elements of the style, but I don't really know where to start in practically DMing in an old-school way. For example... *How do I make a dungeon more than just a bunch of fights? I was reading through Keep on the Borderlands the other day and to my young eyes it just looked like a big list of how many monsters are in each room. I understand that old-school play includes a lot of concepts about the PCs dealing with various monster factions, those factions interacting, monster groups reacting to the PCs by changing their tactics, etc. I loved reading about Tucker's kobolds, but not being a career military man, I don't have any idea where to start with monster tactics. How do I adjudicate monster faction squabbles? How do I adjudicate monsters building barriers and throwing oil and wear pots for helmets? *How do I run a hexcrawl? If I put one interesting thing in every hex, how do I adjudicate whether the players find that thing? It seems to me that a hex of any size could be broken down into smaller hexes ad infinitum until the PCs are moving their speed-per-turn on a 1:1 scale map, but that would take forever. How densely populated should my hexcrawl be? How often should random encounters occur? Etc. etc. etc. *How do I keep track of all this information, like Bad Guy Plan Timelines and NPC opinions of the PCs and monster faction wars and so on? *What sort of balance is sought? A lot of the Caves of Chaos seems to hinge on whether fights draw the attention of nearby monsters or not. In somewhere like the kobold area (I believe it's entrance A) how does this not just lead to dogpiling on the PCs? *I'm sure I have more questions that I'll think of later. But yeah. I'm fascinated by the old-school style, but stymied about how to put it into effect practically. All you old-schoolers and revivalists, give me practical advice!</blockquote>

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