Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8227698" data-attributes="member: 42582">Gygax talks about this sort of thing in his PHB: scouting the dungeon to gain information, so that then it is the players who get to decide what encounters take place.I think you're 100% right that there are complicating factors.In Gygax's game, there is an assumption that you can (typically) tell what level of the dungeon you are on. (There are GM-side tricks that muck with that, like sloping passages and sliding chutes and the like, but there are also player-side counters to those tricks like demi-humans who can sense distance and direction underground.) This helps gauge difficulty (eg the lich vs wight example upthread).There is also the assumption of the widespread use of detection magic: hence Detect Evil, ESP, Wands of Enemy Detection, magic swords, etc. I don't think this is as prevalent or commonly used in contemporary play - I would say at least in part because, frankly, it's a bit boring!A third assumption for all this to work is that the dungeon is largely static between the PCs' incursions. Because if it's not, then the information will be unreliable. You can see that Gygax was changing his mind in relation to this assumption even in the course of writing up his AD&D manuals, as the DMG has an emphasis on a "living, breathing, organic" approach to the way a dungeon changes over time that isn't a good fit with the play advice given in the earlier-published PHB.In this thread, a widespread assumption seems to be that the players will gain the necessary information, and act on it, not in advance of any encounter as Gygax had in mind, but during the encounter itself. As you say that is a recipe for disaster, particularly in the absence of robust rules for fleeing.</blockquote>

Verification