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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aenghus" data-source="post: 6156341" data-attributes="member: 2656">Another issue is that the more swingy the game is, the harder it is to learn before a new group gives up D&D and moves to another game where their PCs don't have the life expectancy of a mayfiy. I learned to play D&D from the books themselves as informed by magazines, and pretty much accepted that D&D was supposed to be heroic asskicking fantasy, not robbery by any means necessary, which is something I didn't encounter until I heard of the OD&D rule. So did practically everyone I played with in Ireland, which never got the personal knowledge transfer that US games got.So "Screw the player" monsters never fit into the D&D game as illustrated on the covers and as I saw it played most of the time. The dirty secret was that DMs around here secretly fudged all the time to avoid killing PCs, (expecially the poor player of his third M-U in a row who couldn't roll hit points to save his life - 1 hp characters don't live long, and the idea of minimum hp values as a house rule hadn't developed.)And before you ask, hordes of PCs were killed in these games, particularly at low level which was a meatgrinder.IMO making encounters wildly unpredictable significantly increases the difficulty of new DMs learning how to run the game, and new players learning how to survive in the game. A steep learning curve and harsh penalties do not make it easy on players new to D&D. Secondly, it encourages a paranoid style of play of never having a fair fight if you can avoid it, exhaustive planning and in my experience can overly punish the straighforward tactics of new players. I'm not saying that a swingy game isn't a valid playstyle, just that there are severe downsides to making it a default.</blockquote>

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