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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 4985326" data-attributes="member: 2205">That may be "old school" and "new school" or it may not.  Certainly, the "new school" way of running the game was an intuitive leap for me right from the get-go.  I have trouble seeing as "new school" the way I've been doing it for... I dunno.  27? 28? years.Yes, so.  That's a bit of a pedantic backpedaling, as far as I'm concerned.  Who had these expectations that you're claiming existed for the play paradigm?  Where were they expressed?  Who expressed this advice?My experience was that players under this paradigm knew that it was supposed to be hard to find stuff, so they were anal-retentive about searching and searching and searching until they had scrounged up most of the treasure to be found.  This is at once the source for my frustration with this playstyle, and the implicaton that the magic and treasure per level guidelines (such as they were) were not well represented by the modules listed.Maybe you had players who were more interested in "moving on" than in finding as much of the loot as possible.  Well, more power to you.  But the implicit paradigm of D&D that some have expressed as a given here in this thread only lasts as long as it finds a group that plays with that same paradigm in mind.  In my experience, that meant very infrequently.  "Old school" means different things to different people, and I'm living proof that some groups never embraced that paradigm, and often never even had it to begin with.  Does that mean that D&D wasn't really the right tool for the job?  Possibly.  But we didn't really know any better.  The "theory" of RPG design wasn't very well developed back then, and even if it was, we sure didn't know anything about it.  We played D&D because that's what was easiest to find in stores.I do, however, reject the claim that unless you played D&D by the so-called implicit paradigm that you probably shouldn't have been playing D&D at all.  D&D was always a pretty flexible beast (until recently actually... at least arguably) that could support a wide variety of playstyles equally well.  Or equally poorly, depending on your point of view.That's my major bone of contention.  This idea that there used to be a Way™ to play D&D, that was the One True Way™ that everybody did, was clearly espoused in the books themselves, and marched hand in hand with the game itself.  My experience was that none of those were true; different groups came at the game with different playstyles from the get-go, the books didn't not clearly enumerate a playstyle, and the game itself was not designed in lock-step with any assumed playstyle; it accreted rules as they occured to the designers at the time.</blockquote>

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