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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 7326414" data-attributes="member: 37579">Playing modern RPG games like Fallout or Skyrim is interesting in that regard because you do have more tools at your disposal: stealth, magic, or weaponry. Often you can eliminate threats from a distance with a ranged weapon. But, most important for this conversation, the NPCs have schedules: they get up, go to their work, and then go to bed occasionally stopping at other places for a time. If you want to rob the town store, it's easiest to go a night, pick the lock (because it locks after dark) and steal everything not nailed down. The world is dramatically more living and organic than anything in an early static D&D module. I imagine the difference between West and East Coast D&D is the spacial difference between the source game. The more the game itself played "Telephone" when passing from gamer-to-gamer across the country, the less it resembled a wargame and the more people made it their own. More people playing the game how they wanted and less playing it how Gygax expected them to play. But I imagine that distinction was short lived, and after a couple years of introducing the game, the East Coast gamers likely adopted some West Coast design ideas. At the time, the distinction likely seemed large and the division pronounced, as RPG gaming was still so new, and everyone was bringing in their own ideas and desires. That that was such a short period of history in the game, measured in years or potentially even just months, compared to the overall 40+ years the game has now been in existence. And while RuneQuest was a significant event, it was by no means alone. There was no shortage of games released at the time which were basically D&D with a slightly different rules tweak. Different rules for attacking, using a percentile die, a different way of tracking health. Which were, generally speaking, shifting rules away from legacy wargaming rules that existed in D&D.Not really. That sort of "puzzle" can happen in a localized and confined room of a dungeon or in a giant player sandbox as they encounter an ambassador to a neighbouring kingdom or meet the Queen's royal advisory or even just bump into a pie merchant with curiously large and cheap pies. The point of invoking the real world is that people do what you say is impossible all the time in the real world. It just becomes less of a certainty and more of a gamble. More skill is required to anticipate the likely variables and overcome them. If you really think your players are unable to handle the idea of a world that changes slightly with their enemies going to sleep and not remaining in the exact same place 24/7 until encountered by the PCs... you need to find smarter players. Or you need to stop going so easy on them. The catch being, not everyone played dungeon crawls just as dungeon crawls in a complete vacuum where nothing exists outside the dungeon, save as one-shots with disposable characters. And not everyone played the classic dungeon crawls in a way that didn't advance the plot. To many, the appeal of the classic modules was being able to add a plot. And even then, very early modules, like Against the Giants began to include plot, with a narrative that ran through and led to the next story. What you're describing as "classic dungeon crawling" really matches closest to tournament play. Which is pretty niche. Not really.... The game is still driven entirely by the DM telling the players what is going on, which the players interpret through a personal lens. And there are still what you describe as puzzles: encounters where you are uncertain if someone is hostile or friendly. Okay, here's the thing about plot... dungeons are a plot. Each room in a dungeon is a scene. And encounter or moment where something happens. The dungeon map is basically a flowchart of the plot that's missing arrows dictating the direction. You can chart the plot by <a href="https://lostdelights.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/800a9-slavepitsoftheundercitywalkthrumap.jpg" target="_blank">drawing a line</a> through the dungeon, telling the story of that dungeon.If you take the plot of an entirely narrative adventure (say, a murder mystery) and make a flowchart, denoting every scene or encounter with a box, you can chart the variable paths to concluding the adventure. (Which is useful for ensuring there's no plot chockpoint where there's only a single route to the solution.) That plot flowchart... is basically the same as a dungeon map. The difference is instead of moving from room to room you're moving from scene to scene, with each scene having its own puzzle and challenge, be it roleplaying or character skill or player skill. On a functional/ structural design level, there's zero difference between a site-based adventure and a story-based adventure. The difference is largely a flavour one. And a mental distinction because they can feel different. Given, structurally, there is no difference between the two types of adventure, that also means there's no difference is other aspects of the game tangential to the flowchart. Such as worldbuilding, which is there to provide context for the adventure and continuity for events that happened before, during, and after the adventure.</blockquote>

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