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NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2024 15:23:12 +0000
From: Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Subject: Re: What difficultly level do you play one?
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2024 11:23:12 -0400
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On Thu, 11 Jul 2024 09:31:05 +0100, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:

>On 10/07/2024 12:22, Zaghadka wrote:
>> On Wed, 10 Jul 2024 09:28:12 +0100, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action, JAB
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> Another one of my pet peeves, monsters that just inhabit rooms waiting
>>> to be killed by some passing adventurers. Do they never eat, sleep, work?
>> 
>> Ah, the Gygax approach. Yeah, that's why 2e introduced this whole novel
>> concept called "ecology." That and the idea that creatures - that should
>> be mortal enemies - are just hanging out in one room, never leaving,
>> while the other group they hate hangs out in another is silliness.
>> 
>
>That chimes with my experience of playing AD&D 'back in the day'. We 
>used to run pre-written modules mixed with homebrew ones and naturally 
>the 'formula' of the former was the basis for the latter. Get to 
>dungeon, kill everything and grab the loot. We even had a DM that 
>dispensed with all the faff of finding the dungeon and just placed you 
>at the entrance.


In fairness, while the conceit of the dungeon-crawl was fairly basic
in the day, even the early modules had the expectation of a more
robust and reactive world. But the modules were rarely written with
that intention stated outright, almost never giving out specific
alternatives and details on what to do should the players stray from
the expected path. It was left unsaid, and so many DMs -sticking to
the text- played the game exactly as written, which led to a lot of
very static dungeons where you COULD rest at will, with enemy NPCs
(who were little more than hit-points and stat-blocks) that cheerfully
remained cloistered in their assigned rooms until the players stumbled
upon them.

Worse, this behavior became self-reinforcing to a point where players
played the game and then expected that's what D&D was about, and so
created their own modules that were loot-heavy combat-focused
dungeon-crawls. But I don't really see that as the intent of TSR and
Gygax. It was just a result of the style of writing; of creating a
fairly bland 'sand-box' setting that expected the DM and players to
give it life without providing much in the way of assistance on how to
do that.

That D&D -and the hobby- was so new was partly to blame, of course. It
wasn't really known what sort of assistance players would need in this
area. Especially since -at the start- TSR couldn't even /imagine/
adventure modules would be a thing; surely, they thought, everyone
would just make their own adventures rather than buy a pre-build
adventure! 

And TSR's own format hampered them as well; early modules were quite
short in page count (24pp) but expansive in territory. They often
included multiple cities and dungeons, and there was only so much
detail and advice they could squeeze into every booklet. Later
adventures became smaller in scope, longer in page count, and a lot of
this extra space was generally used to enliven the settings beyond
just listing the inhabitants and contents of each room... because the
authors learned that players /needed/ that extra detail if they were
going to do anything beyond a brain-dead dungeon-crawl.

(In fact, I've read that the world's most famous dungeon crawl module,
"Tomb of Horrors", was written as a take-down of this sort of
gameplay. 'So this is the sort of dungeon crawl you want? Well, here,
delve into this and watch your characters suffer and die.' I guess the
hope was players would bash their heads against the ruthless
difficulty of Acererak's dungeon and learn to play smarter ;-)

The TL;DR is that while a lot of D&D modules come across as fairly
uninspired dungeon-crawls (and undeniably that is how most of them
actually /were/ played), I don't get the impression that's how the
writers EXPECTED them to be played. 



>
>Icewind Dale I never got on with as although I could see the design 
>behind it of having a more TT D&D experience, I just found that even by 
>then D&D, and what I wanted out of a CRPG, had moved on to having more 
>social interactions and a real story line in them. It's one of the games 
>I never got the enhanced edition of.

I honestly have very little recollection of the Icewind Dale series. I
know I played them and there are a few memories here and there, but on
the whole it didn't leave much impression. But the games were
purposefully designed to be slicker, more-action focused adventures;
less role-playing, more combat. They were designed to compete with the
likes of "Diablo" (which was all the rage at the time), and so things
like consistent, believable mechanics became less important than just
getting players right into the thick of things. The intent of the
original "Baldur's Gate" was to recreate the tabletop experience as
much as you could in a single-player CRPG, but a lot of that was
purposefully scrapped for the Icewind Dale games.

Which, you know, is fine in its own way. I didn't particularly care
much for the games, but they weren't terrible; they just weren't to my
taste. But I hold them to a different standard than I do the "Baldur's
Gate" or even the venerable Gold Box games, because they were striving
for different things.