What were Gygax & Arneson & pals looking at for early D&D?

[Foxwarrior]

I like your post Also, this thing where people fall back onto the "correct" option is in a way why I think 4X computer games are the closest you get to TTRPGs on the computer. Like, they're so convoluted that you can't really expect to find the right move, so you kinda have to fall back on some heuristics to make decisions. And the heuristics can be given names like "I'm playing the fungi who just want to be friends but are bad at it".

I wonder how much you can nudge people onto different ideas of the "correct" option by just occasionally insisting that they must take a particular course of action. Like having a quest where you're not allowed to kill the goblins or something.

[Lord Charlemagne]

Building off of what Whipstitch said, I feel like the reason many campaigns are just Tolkien mayhem is twofold but goes back to the primary point that a lot of GM material is very called in, if it is even there at all.

First, while many books have a GM section, I often feel like they don't actually teach you to GM, merely telling you bullet points. I remember there was one link posted elsewhere that led to a blog that talked about how older editions of D&D wrote out a whole procedure for dungeon exploration & how said information chipped away or omitted piece by piece until it was no longer there. That is useful information, because even if the procedure is too unwieldy to use or impractical, it lays a starting foundation to build off to suit your groups needs. In addition, I haven't really seen many sources on how to write a more overreaching story & plot in a TTRPG setting, which if you're pitching your system as one to tell stories with, is pretty important, because writing & telling a story through a TTRPG is very different from storytelling in a book or movie.

Second, is that a lot of games fail to try and make GMing actively engaging & fun. GMing is usually, by necessity, engaging, as players are a handful, but many games simply don't give the GM any fun tools, which is a huge problem, as if the GM isn't actively enjoying a campaign, it isn't going to last. This is actually the reason I hear from groups who shift from 5e --> 3.5, not because the players want more or well defined stuff, but because a GM does, which 3.5 offers & 5e doesn't.

[tussock]

Also just plain gamist inventions like the Gelatinous Cube and company is the reason the stacks of corpses and their kit vanish between dungeon expeditions, and it's invisible because that's why you didn't see it on the way out.

I absolutely love that. I never thought of that and think that's really clever. I wonder if there's more stuff like that where they added something to the fictional space to make the world make more sense (by some definition of the word sense)

I dare say there's a good few of them, though that's the one I know of that was explained as such in OD&D.

Disintegrate, when fired at a large solid bit of anything, burrows a 10'x10'x10' volume of empty space in it. Handily explaining why the early dungeons all have 10' wide, 10' high corridors (aside from the game using a 10' per scale inch for most stuff indoors).


Oh, Teleport, a classic. When cast can rarely but randomly leave you some small multiple of 10' high or 10' low compared to your target. So, Wizards have to live in tall, thin towers, with dungeons underneath, like it says they do.


The level limits on non-humans were not for play balance, Gygax openly ignored them in actual play, wrote later rules giving workarounds, but were in the book to explain why the game world was ruled by humans. And openly the world was ruled by humans because it was just easier to write that way, less words needed. Same reason they couldn't have the good classes.

Probably way more I'm forgetting.

XP for gold, that massively overwhelmed monster XP, is explicitly there because it made the players hunt treasure, and avoid pointless fights, which is what the stories the game was based on had the protagonists doing. That's the other way around, rules to naturally generate appropriate stories, rather than to explain them. Gygax simply apologised for being unable to explain why gold was worth XP, it was just "good for the game" that it was.

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Way more rules make the world "play appropriately". There's ear seekers because people in the stories don't just all listen at every door, OK? There's rot grubs because people in the stories don't dig through every pile of shit just in case (side effect of treasure for XP, clarified as "appropriately defended treasure" by the time of the 1e DMG, so "Greyhawking" was technically not encouraged at that point). There's wandering monsters all the damn time because people in the stories don't argue about pointless shit, and also don't sleep in the dungeon, thank you very much, and also it's a very easy way to have guards turn up, and the dungeon in general respond to whatever the PCs are doing by just ramping up the rate of checks, without having to re-write the location-based core of the game on the go.

I'd guess there was Piercers because someone asked why there was stalactites in a newly built dungeon, so you know, living stalactites that try to kill you for asking clever questions, Mr Clever Man. There's certainly rust monsters because would you please not just automatically try to stab every damn thing already, sometimes I'd like to parley.

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And in general, the carrot and stick approach, people hated the sticks. You give people big XP for treasure and they will get pretty damned clever about finding recoverable and defended treasure and getting it with minimal fighting effort, and massively enjoy the process. You rust their +3 sword because they attack with it all the time, they're gunna hate you, what the fuck was a +3 sword ever there for but to attack everything with!

But it's also fairly hard to produce a carrot-based approach to stop folks over-doing parts of the game, and, thread drift I'm almost following.

[Thaluikhain]

I'd guess there was Piercers because someone asked why there was stalactites in a newly built dungeon, so you know, living stalactites that try to kill you for asking clever questions, Mr Clever Man.

I thought that was more camouflaged monsters, like the ones that look like ceiling tiles or the other ones that look like floor tiles. Lurkers above and...trappers? Also, mimics. Or those "I'm not a beholder, I'm an exploding balloon" monster...gas spores?