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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9723922" data-attributes="member: 7026594">Right.  I'm saying quite a lot of us back then were missing the context which made level drain more palatable and less onerous.  Just as Gary's 1E rules for Wishes increasing ability scores look completely absurd unless you infer that Wishes must have been incredibly common in the games he was running and playing in.Yup. Folks made adjustments.  And with Gary's very influential advice in the 1E DMG and elsewhere to be stingy and keep the players hungry, that this was the way to keep the game exciting and interesting, the more common adjustment was to use level draining undead less often.Or perhaps to house rule level drain to make it less nasty.  I remember one group I played with implemented Life Energy Levels equal to the character's Hit Dice, which were drained but didn't actually reduce the level of the character.Yup.  I think there's a lot of truth here.A lot of older players have also house ruled.  The OSR has talked about alternative rules for level drain for at least a couple of decades now.  Here's an article from Dyson's site from 2011 where he offers a bunch of alternatives to level drain.  Dyson has mentioned that he started playing in 1979, before the DMG came out.[URL unfurl="true"]https://dysonlogos.blog/2011/01/11/labyrinth-lord-uniquely-undead/[/URL]</blockquote>