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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7768646" data-attributes="member: 29398">In the sense that the game world is more or less out to kill you, should you be so brave and-or foolish as to go adventuring in it, then yes; and goal number one thus becomes simple survival.  It's you (and your party, maybe) against the world (or major parts of it).  Nothing at all wrong with this as a basis for design and-or play, but it does quite intentionally put the DM in a dual role of both referee and opponent - meaning a bad DM can ruin things just that much faster.The 'survival as goal one' ideal has very much receded in later editions of D&D.ToH is the extreme example often hauled out in these discussions.  A number of other early modules have elements of this to them as well, and for a contextually-very-good reason: they were originally written for competitive tournaments.Tournament modules by and large don't translate all that well to ongoing campaign play without some DM tweaking.  With said tweaking, however, they're often just fine.As for goals, player goals and character goals on the sacle you're talking about can very easily line up.  Player and PC both want to finish the dungeon and-or complete the mission.  Player and PC both want to see the PC get wealthy enough to retire at or around name level.  Put another way, the 'victory condition' for both player and PC is very much the same.With this last sentence I agree.Perhaps.  But I think the side-along concepts of ongoing campaigns, 'stables' of characters, generally high(er) lethality and-or character (and player!) turnover, and relative ease of char-gen tend to back me up.Story is sometimes orthagonal, to be sure, in situations where the DM and-or players take what might have seemed like a bunch of disparate adventures and kind of put a story together after the fact - been there done that. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />But story is sometimes also built in, or intended to be until-unless the players/PCs make some hard left turns.However - and this is what I'm really getting at - in either case it's the story of the party and what it achieves as an entity that matters and that will be retold (both in and out of the fiction, for all that), no matter how many actual characters were gone through in the process.</blockquote>

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