Celebrating 2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary!
Yesterday I posted a bit more in regard to this post(XP Started as One of D&D’s Breakthrough Ideas. Now the Designers Don’t See the Point ) at the DM DAVID blog.
He says:
He goes on to talk about Gygax increasing the XP needed to keep advancing in levels and that leading to players going ever deeper in dungeons in search of more loot to gain more XP to fuel increasing levels with bigger treasures the deeper you went.
The part that is not mentioned as much was the creativity of the dungeon design itself, that made exploring the dungeon interesting in and of itself aside from the monsters, the treasure and going up in levels. As a referee, I strove then and strive now to make the exploration worth it on its own.
The first dungeon I ever did, did not have any physical treasure in it. During the week I picked out about a dozen quotes (I am looking for them, I am sure they are still in a box somewhere) and they traveled for a several weeks across a desert to some old ruins and down they went and at an entrance to an area there was the quote craved into the wall beside the door with it all looking very foreboding and then from that point on it was all improvisation generated from the quote and the players reactions. We played for 14 hours with twelve players and got through all of it. No battles and no treasure, but they talked about it the rest of the school year (four more months) during which time we played twice a week. At least eight of the players made a point of telling me directly that treasure would have spoiled it/ruined it.
I had other dungeons and wilderness adventures that the players talked a lot about between games with battles, treasures, heroics, sacrifice and glory, but nothing they talked about as much as that game. IMO treasure and leveling up is not the seven course meal, it is dessert.
More tomorrow.
Yesterday I posted a bit more in regard to this post(XP Started as One of D&D’s Breakthrough Ideas. Now the Designers Don’t See the Point ) at the DM DAVID blog.
He says:
In addition to rewarding players for seeking fun, the XP-for-gold system offered another benefit: It created a simple way to award experience points for succeeding at non-combat challenges. As a new PC in the original game, potentially with 1 hit point, you had little chance of leveling through combat. Players joke that D&D is about killing things and taking their stuff, but in the original game, you were better off using your wits to take stuff. So long as your cunning led to gold, you got experience.If you look at fairy tales, a lot of them were about outsmarting and/or tricking the monsters. If you have not read fairy tales and for the last 50 years an ever decreasing number of people have go read Jack and the Beanstalk, Brave Little Tailor (Seven at One Blow) and numerous others as well as the older pre-Tolkien fantasy. My original group was made up of people that were steeped in this literature. We had also read widely in mythology - Greek, Roman, Norse, Celtic and some selected mythology from around the world outside western culture.
He goes on to talk about Gygax increasing the XP needed to keep advancing in levels and that leading to players going ever deeper in dungeons in search of more loot to gain more XP to fuel increasing levels with bigger treasures the deeper you went.
The part that is not mentioned as much was the creativity of the dungeon design itself, that made exploring the dungeon interesting in and of itself aside from the monsters, the treasure and going up in levels. As a referee, I strove then and strive now to make the exploration worth it on its own.
The first dungeon I ever did, did not have any physical treasure in it. During the week I picked out about a dozen quotes (I am looking for them, I am sure they are still in a box somewhere) and they traveled for a several weeks across a desert to some old ruins and down they went and at an entrance to an area there was the quote craved into the wall beside the door with it all looking very foreboding and then from that point on it was all improvisation generated from the quote and the players reactions. We played for 14 hours with twelve players and got through all of it. No battles and no treasure, but they talked about it the rest of the school year (four more months) during which time we played twice a week. At least eight of the players made a point of telling me directly that treasure would have spoiled it/ruined it.
I had other dungeons and wilderness adventures that the players talked a lot about between games with battles, treasures, heroics, sacrifice and glory, but nothing they talked about as much as that game. IMO treasure and leveling up is not the seven course meal, it is dessert.
More tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment