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A return to yesteryear
Mar. 10th, 2008 12:10 pmSo, aside from a couple of birthday parties, and finding more water in our basement (okay, house, I get the hint - if there's an inch of rain outside, I'm going to need to get out the shop-vac), this weekend we had our Gygax Memorial Dungeon Crawl.
I was rather apprehensive about getting bodies at the table on short notice, but we had plenty. I got out the rulebooks my eldest brother gave me back when I was in 7th grade, and a copy of a classic tournament module (S2 - White Plume Mountain), and we quickly slapped together characters and dove in. Fun was had, jokes were made, orange munchies were eaten, and it seems a good time was had by all.
The players managed to come up with crafty ways to avoid a couple of major combats - while tactically clever, that was a strategic bad move. If we had not been cut short on time, the monsters they had dodged earlier were going to come back and bite them on the butt in a grand melee that might well have wiped them out. However, evening came on, and folks had to go, so this ugly scenario never came into play.
In reviewing and running through this old favorite, the differences in design philosophy between the 70s and today became painfully clear. Today, when A GM picks up a module, and there's some trap or terrain that's physically difficult to deal with, the obvious solutions are typically spelled out for the GM. If the character wants to leap out over the lake of boiling mud and grab the chain hanging from the ceiling 10 feet away, you'd be told how hard it is, and what skills would apply. Not so in the old classic. The situations were described, but rarely was any mechanics guidance given for how the characters might deal with them.
This works well for a fast and adventurous one-shot, but it does brign into focus some of the reasons I moved away from AD&D for campaign play.
I was rather apprehensive about getting bodies at the table on short notice, but we had plenty. I got out the rulebooks my eldest brother gave me back when I was in 7th grade, and a copy of a classic tournament module (S2 - White Plume Mountain), and we quickly slapped together characters and dove in. Fun was had, jokes were made, orange munchies were eaten, and it seems a good time was had by all.
The players managed to come up with crafty ways to avoid a couple of major combats - while tactically clever, that was a strategic bad move. If we had not been cut short on time, the monsters they had dodged earlier were going to come back and bite them on the butt in a grand melee that might well have wiped them out. However, evening came on, and folks had to go, so this ugly scenario never came into play.
In reviewing and running through this old favorite, the differences in design philosophy between the 70s and today became painfully clear. Today, when A GM picks up a module, and there's some trap or terrain that's physically difficult to deal with, the obvious solutions are typically spelled out for the GM. If the character wants to leap out over the lake of boiling mud and grab the chain hanging from the ceiling 10 feet away, you'd be told how hard it is, and what skills would apply. Not so in the old classic. The situations were described, but rarely was any mechanics guidance given for how the characters might deal with them.
This works well for a fast and adventurous one-shot, but it does brign into focus some of the reasons I moved away from AD&D for campaign play.
