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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7331971" data-attributes="member: 82106">Here I must point out, if nobody has already, that Original D&amp;D has a VERY PRECISE answer for this. You break out a copy of the Avalon Hill game Survival and you utilize its rules, presumably along with a DM generated map, to play out the character's movements in the Wilderness. Beyond that you utilize the random encounter rules to add a monster dimension to this game of surviving. It really is quite detailed, maybe somewhat less so than the dungeon, but certainly it has a fairly structured dimension to it, as-written.Now, I agree that once you are outside the Dungeon environment, and particularly when in the Town environment, the game does become more open-ended and the idea that the DM can present some neutrally generated material, as many would espouse, becomes increasingly untenable. In fact the REAL pitfall IME is that the game of D&amp;D never really provided the means to play out the sorts of fantasies that many players envisaged. DMs were increasingly, especially as AD&amp;D evolved, forced to 'fudge things' to try to get that to work, and the discrepancy between the exploration-focused rules and the story-focused table expectations becomes a breaking point. No amount of pre-generated content, pseudo-realism in game systems, or attempts at even-handed refereeing really fixes it. But, OD&amp;D, it doesn't really suffer too much there, because of course nobody had much in the way of expectations, the game isn't really that well described, and it really does spell things out pretty thoroughly in terms of a sort of process.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 7331971, member: 82106"] Here I must point out, if nobody has already, that Original D&D has a VERY PRECISE answer for this. You break out a copy of the Avalon Hill game [I]Survival [/I]and you utilize its rules, presumably along with a DM generated map, to play out the character's movements in the Wilderness. Beyond that you utilize the random encounter rules to add a monster dimension to this game of surviving. It really is quite detailed, maybe somewhat less so than the dungeon, but certainly it has a fairly structured dimension to it, as-written. Now, I agree that once you are outside the Dungeon environment, and particularly when in the Town environment, the game does become more open-ended and the idea that the DM can present some neutrally generated material, as many would espouse, becomes increasingly untenable. In fact the REAL pitfall IME is that the game of D&D never really provided the means to play out the sorts of fantasies that many players envisaged. DMs were increasingly, especially as AD&D evolved, forced to 'fudge things' to try to get that to work, and the discrepancy between the exploration-focused rules and the story-focused table expectations becomes a breaking point. No amount of pre-generated content, pseudo-realism in game systems, or attempts at even-handed refereeing really fixes it. But, OD&D, it doesn't really suffer too much there, because of course nobody had much in the way of expectations, the game isn't really that well described, and it really does spell things out pretty thoroughly in terms of a sort of process. [/QUOTE]

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