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Author Topic: Diving into AD&D's Dungeoneer's Survival Guide  (Read 2101 times)

Svenhelgrim

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Re: Diving into AD&D's Dungeoneer's Survival Guide
« Reply #15 on: October 19, 2021, 11:59:57 AM »
@ Pat,

The OA approach seems much better.  I shall have to revisit that book.

Mishihari

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Re: Diving into AD&D's Dungeoneer's Survival Guide
« Reply #16 on: October 19, 2021, 05:16:12 PM »
The thing I took away from WSG when I first encountered it back in Nineteen Eighty....mumble mumble, Damn I'm old, was that there were things in D&D that could kill or hinder you, but you had to solve them in ways other than killing them back, other than dungeon traps.
To this day, I feel that environmental effects are an important aspect of a game, either to bring home the feel of the story, or to make combat more interesting.
I wish they had carried more of that over to 5e. The exploration pillar is pretty weak compared to combat and could use some help. Of course, in 5e, anything that doesn’t kill you can generally be wiped away after a long rest, so the only way to make the environment hazardous is to use the exhaustion rules (which are not generally thought to be well made).

If you're going to make exploration challenges interesting, the whole system need to be built with that in mind.  At this point D&D would need to be rebuilt from the ground up to do that, and I'm not just talking about a new edition.  This is one of the goals in my current game: I want it to play like Uncharted or Tomb Raider, where environmental challenges and combat are about a 50/50 mix, and I want the challenges to be both fun and meaningful.  It's a challenging problem.  A functional exhaustion system and much slower recovery were just the start, and even those two design choices ripple into everything else in the game.