Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 8640202" data-attributes="member: 6877472">Look, I've played fantasy ttrpg's a long time.  I started in AD&D.  I've had my fair share of tracking rations and ammunition, keeping careful inventory of potions and consumable magic items, stocking vials of acid, alchemist's fire, holy water, 10 foot poles, tents, wineskins, 50' ropes and grappling hooks.I've carefully navigated long dungeon corridors loaded with traps, and dealt with difficult terrain, bandits, wild animals, foraging for food, and the simple problem of knowing which way north is.  Not once has it ever been fun for me.  Finding cool places to explore and loot is fun.  The act of traveling in the wilderness to get there, is not.  Most travel in D&D is boring.  You travel for a few hours, mark off your rations, make sure you have a source of fresh water, keep a marching order, set watches, sleep, and get some random encounters. Only a few, very good DM's over the years have found ways to make exploration anything better than a filler arc.  I'm not one of them.  I realized this early on.  So what I do is I set a few "interesting moments" up in advance.  I say "you guys travel X days and Y miles, and these are the Z things you see that are interesting on your trip".  I'm quite happy when a game allows me to have characters with things like endure elements, create food and water, alarm, know direction, and tiny hut so we can get to more exciting parts of the game.Some people enjoy this style of play, and I'm happy for them.  But when they wax nostalgic about the "good old days", I'm left going, "I was there.  They weren't always that good."The idea of a big world and lots of travel time is to make the world seem more real and full of life.  To make it larger.  But the game has always had a paradigm that shrinks the world very quickly.For many characters, save for heavy armor users, your first big ticket item in a lot of the old games was a mount of some kind.  Perhaps your party buys a cart to carry around supplies and treasure.  Maybe your DM will even not go out of their way to kill your mounts while you explore the Ruin of the Week.Eventually you find handy haversacks, murlynd's spoons, ration boxes, or instant fortresses, items that have existed for a very long time, and seemingly only do so to less the ease of long treks.Maybe you finally get enough free spell slots to cast the many spells that have been part of the game for decades now to bypass these challenges.Or maybe your party has a skilled outdoorsmen to begin with, like a Ranger or Druid, who, depending on the edition, have "bypass wilderness challenges" as their hat.I find it telling that the game has always been about shrinking the world and getting you to places faster, with spells and magic items to deal with logistics problems.You find a Quiver of Ehlonna? You buy a few hundred gp worth of arrows and never worry about ammunition again.Only in the very early game has this ever really been a problem, unless the DM goes out of their way to try and prevent players from solving it.And eventually, Wizards get the ability to teleport across the world in an instant- a point few, if any old school games (or new school, for that matter) I played in ever reached.In fact, most of the AD&D DM's I personally know liked to impose training costs, level drains, and other hindrances to ensure you stayed at the "sweet spot" of levels pretty much forever.  Because they knew the game changed after awhile, and they knew they didn't care for that change.When 3e came out, and made magic items a little more player facing, and players were given reasons to delve a little more deeply into their spell lists (spontaneous cure spells for Clerics as an example), suddenly, this entire approach to playing vanished overnight.A 5th level Cleric could keep their party protected from the dangers of a harsh desert indefinitely, leaving the only real problem the thing that you need adventurers for in the first place.  Monsters.If someone wants to kitbash the game to recapture this style of play, they can, but it really feels like they are fighting the system to return to a time that barely ever existed.</blockquote>

Verification