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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gus L" data-source="post: 9613631" data-attributes="member: 7045072">I'm not one to defend some of Gygax's more irksome advice or every design decision made in 1974 - 1985 ... but what you're focusing on it the worst aspects of early design ... and presumably if you're not over 60, kids playing D&D. I had those same experiences in the 1980's. 12 year olds aren't usually the best referees, but that's not system dependent. Most everything else is contextual.For example you also mention Tomb of Horrors - it gets brought up a lot as a horror ... but rarely with the acknowledgement that it's the first published attempt at a "puzzle dungeon" and that it's a higher level tournament module. The ending is a big FU even! That's Demi-Lich has no treasure! Why? Because you're supposed to be playing it with pre-gens and it's meant to kill off almost every group that goes into it ... it's rewards are the meta-game goal of winning the tournament. Worse, it was designed back before Gygax et. al realized that tournaments needed scoring and because scoring based on how far one could get through the adventure doesn't work! 10th level PCs are able to deal with what ToH throws at them. Of course ToH was beloved by jerk 12 year olds everywhere and certainly has opportunities for gotcha type situations, but it's not impossible, not even overwhelmingly difficult in it's own context. Not that most people want to play in that context ... Which brings up my points here:  A) Sure, older editions and play styles aren't without problems, but these problems do not exist to the degree you're describing them unless one has a bad referee. B)The OSR, partially through silly maxims like "Combat is a Fail State", was a largely successful effort to resolve a lot of these problems. Using the actual old rules (or modern variations on them) around exploration help a lot. The play style is still susceptible to bad designers and bad referees of course ... and they can take many of the forms mentioned - but that's hardly a unique situation.It is also a higher lethality style then more character narrative focused play styles ... but PC death is also a correspondingly less serious issue. I've had I think 8 characters die in the campaign I'm running right now in about 23 sessions. It's not been a problem and none of them has felt unfair as far as I know. At the end of the day for any system player expectations and referee understanding of the play style are key.</blockquote>

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