Quote from: gamerGoyf;689505So the wargamers who comprised the playerbase of "original D&D" just completely abandoned doing combats in favor of tea and crumpets in their fantasy wargame hack. That's some sick revisionism bro.

Nope, but then you already know what youre saying is false when every response you make is reductio ad absurdum.

And please stop conflating my magical tea parties with your dirty role playing hobby.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;689503D&D rewards killing stuff (XP) and taking their stuff (possibly XP, but definitely money that can be used to buy goods and services).  

Choosing not to kill things and avoid taking their stuff is not rewarded.  Even if you accomplish 'the mission' the system is not designed to reward you.

If you 'rescue the princess' without killing anything or taking it's stuff, your only reward is potentially a friendly contact.  

The system rewards murder-hoboism.

Hate to disagree, but what happened just as often as the Full Frontal Assault method of gaining XP was finding where some magical treasure was and stealthily taking it for the XP. If the XP value of the treasure was high enough, then we knew that it was guarded by something we could not overcome by combat so we had to outsmart the defenses without engaging them. This was a cornerstone for our play in AD&D and AD&D2.

Quote from: soviet;689543By the time you get to third edition combat is by far the primary means of generating XP and only very old school people remember about or use the GP thing. Advancement is easier so killing your way to second level is the expected progression. Easy combats are to be sought out and finding clever ways to avoid winnable encounters is actually counter-productive. The combat system itself becomes much more complex and tactical as people are expecting to engage with it regularly (rather than it being a failure condition as it is in some old school play). Noncombat activites are to be defeated by skill rolls because they earn you XP in a way that non-rules based creativity does not. The rules become the game.

OK, this just shows a complete misunderstanding of what CR actually did in relation to XP. And it has come up before, a lot.

Even in the beginning when the 3.0 PHB came out and had the 2000 Survival Kit in place that allowed you to start playing, CR gave XP for overcoming obstacles and you did not have to overcome them solely by combat. That is a very important distinction that gets ignored far too often, usually by someone trying to paint the game in a very different light.

Quote from: jeff37923;689572Hate to disagree, but what happened just as often as the Full Frontal Assault method of gaining XP was finding where some magical treasure was and stealthily taking it for the XP. If the XP value of the treasure was high enough, then we knew that it was guarded by something we could not overcome by combat so we had to outsmart the defenses without engaging them. This was a cornerstone for our play in AD&D and AD&D2.

Not to mention, the king rewarded you with coins from his own coffers upon restitution of the apple of his eyes, which would translate as, wait for it... yes! XP! AND the means to train as well! Perhaps he would even allow you to use the services of his alchemist, or give you the Sword of Badassery since he is too old to wield it and would like his now trusted servants to accomplish this new, secret task for the good of the Kingdom! Funny how that works, heh?

Quote from: jeff37923;689572Hate to disagree, but what happened just as often as the Full Frontal Assault method of gaining XP was finding where some magical treasure was and stealthily taking it for the XP. If the XP value of the treasure was high enough, then we knew that it was guarded by something we could not overcome by combat so we had to outsmart the defenses without engaging them. This was a cornerstone for our play in AD&D and AD&D2.

I get it.  You're not disagreeing with me as much as you think you are.

Getting treasure was rewarded more than fighting (because GP=XP) so if you could get a lot of GP without risking dying, the game rewarded you for it.  If you could straight up murder the monsters (because they weren't that tough) the game rewarded you for it.  

Sneaking into the dragon's lair, stealing it's hoard and avoiding combat is great - if you can manage it.  That's high risk, high reward.  Most groups would avoid doing that unless they were either SURE they could avoid a confrontation or they had a reasonable chance of at least surviving a fight (even if they couldn't hope to defeat the dragon).  

Here's an example from 'real play' in the 3.x era.  I didn't play with the group long because it wasn't a play style I enjoyed.  I was a player (an old, crotchety man who became a wizard as a 2nd career).  

The party needed to enter a fortress to achieve a certain objective (that I don't quite remember).  While we were exploring we came to a room with a garbage pile.  We were sure there was a monster waiting there (probably an Otyugh).  But garbage piles are great places to lose magical items, so maybe there was some 'rich stuff' waiting for us there.  I cast detect magic and sure enough, there was something there.  It was small, so I cast mage hand and pulled the item to me.  It was a magical ring of protection +1.  I told the party that we should continue on and not waste any resources on fighting the creature in the garbage pile, because that was ancillary to our mission.  The rest of the party said something to the effect of 'well, we need the XP'.  They ended up wading in and killing it with a fairly difficult fight while I watched.  Then they wanted to spike the doors and rest because they were hurt.  

From my perspective, getting the treasure with minimal risk to life and limb was the 'preferred solution'.  But since getting the ring wasn't 'overcoming the challenge', to get XP the party decided to fight.  That's where the system rewards a particular play style.  

2nd edition (which I played and ran) we never used GP=XP.  Since it took a lot of XP to go up in levels (say 150,000 sometimes) killing orcs for 15 XP wasn't usually worthwhile.  But if we could kill 30 or 40 in their sleep, well, who passes up free XP?  The system rewards murdering them in their sleep, because they're worth XP whether they know you're stabbing them or not.  The system doesn't award XP for not killing them.  

In my version of an ideal world, the only thing you get XP for is completing adventures.  I don't care HOW you do it - you can kill everything or avoid killing everything - you can take all the statuary and pull the gold fillings from the slain or leave all the treasure...  Gaining levels is about going on adventures.  Completing adventures should net you XP.  

If you get treasure, too, that's a different type of reward.  

Even if D&D doesn't encourage murder-hoboism (which I contest that it does), it undeniably encourages tomb-robbing and looting corpses.  'Sorry that you're dead, King Arthur, but it'd be a waste if we didn't use your +5 Sword of Sharpness against Mordred.  Yoink.'  

From the point of view of system design, everyone should be aware that rewarding a certain action encourages that action (Pavlov will be happy to explain fully).  So it's worth asking, 'what do I want to reward'.  

You can reward players based on taking cinematic actions.  You can reward players for 'taking one for the team'.  Or you can reward them for surviving.  Or any number of other things.  Depending on what you choose, most people will end up doing that thing more often.

Quote from: Benoist;689576Not to mention, the king rewarded you with coins from his own coffers upon restitution of the apple of his eyes, which would translate as, wait for it... yes! XP! AND the means to train as well! Perhaps he would even allow you to use the services of his alchemist, or give you the Sword of Badassery since he is to hold to wield it and would like his now trusted servants to accomplish this new, secret task for the good of the Kingdom! Funny how that works, heh?

Clearly, if you get XP for GP, removing all the silver inlay on the magical sigils, carting back several tons of statues, rolling up every tapestry and carrying it back nets you...MORE XP and MORE TRAINING and MORE of EVERYTHING, plus whatever you'd get from the King anyway.  

It's not unreasonable to think that people will want MORE of anything good - even to the point where it becomes self destructive.  Winning the lottery ruins the lives of a lot of people - but people still want all that money.  It's human nature.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;689578I get it.  You're not disagreeing with me as much as you think you are.

It seems we are not, however I disagree with your conclusion that the system encourages murder-hoboism.

In the 3.x example you gave with the unneccessary Otyugh fight, the problem as I see it was not the rules, but the perception by the Players that it boiled down to combat=XP and the DM who didn't reward the challenge being overcome with at least a partial XP value for that CR. Your character certainly overcame the challenge of getting the magic ring, but did not waste resources in a combat for it. If the challenge was just the Otyugh, then there is no way around engaging it (although luring it away from the treasure could count).

This may be a point which we just don't agree on.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;689581Clearly, if you get XP for GP, removing all the silver inlay on the magical sigils, carting back several tons of statues, rolling up every tapestry and carrying it back nets you...MORE XP and MORE TRAINING and MORE of EVERYTHING, plus whatever you'd get from the King anyway.  

It's not unreasonable to think that people will want MORE of anything good - even to the point where it becomes self destructive.  Winning the lottery ruins the lives of a lot of people - but people still want all that money.  It's human nature.

Of course, but all that stuff might be guarded by stuff that wants to kill you and can, then you have to secure all that shit and bring it back to the surface in order for it to become XP, which potentially carries its own weight (pun intended) of logistical problems, potentially slowing you down, triggering wandering monster rolls, etc. It's as though the game was all about risk v rewards management, knowing when to steal, when to bargain, when to attack and how, when to leave something there for the time being to come back to it later, what to explore, when and how you proceed, if you bring in porters and men at arms with the risk of making even more noise with easy to kill rookies following you around... as though the game was more than its rules, more than numbers and white room scenarios, more than "I roll to hit", and more than "killing things and taking their stuff".

I got to hand it to you, though: for a guy thinking Mike Mearls is a hack (assuming you agree with the Den's party line, here), you learned his tag line and subsequent reductio ad absurdum of the game very well indeed, to the point it's become second nature, apparently.

Quote from: RPGPundit;487719Is "murder-hobos" an accurate depiction of how you would define the PCs of your D&D game?

No, but it fit the PCs in my last Traveller game. The same players in D&D routinely go for being "good guys." Neither posture is an imposition by either rules set, though; it's the players' choice.

Murder is a culturally defined subset of killing. In the case of an RPG, there may be different definitions from the characters' point of view and the players' point of view.

There can also be relevant questions of fact. Is an orc in D&D as much a person as a troll in RuneQuest? Even in the latter case, of course, there are facts of circumstance as well, but thinking of the orc as just the same as the troll may (depending on campaign) be misleading.

During the game's boom years of 79 to 85, millions of people learned to play D&D from the classic modules.

The G series
The D series
Keep on the Borderlands
Village of Hommlet
A series
Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth
Temple of Elemental Evil

In almost every case, the purpose of those modules was to kills monsters. Kill the giants. Kill the drow. Kill the humanoids in the Caves of Chaos. Kill the evil lurking under the moathouse. Kill the slavers.

Nothing in the background written for those modules indicated, or even implied, that the purpose of the adventure was to get in, find loot, and get out. That may have been the way Gygax and his buddies ran their megadungeons in 1974-77. But the millions of people buying the Holmes and Moldvay sets had no way of knowing that's the way the game was 'supposed' to be played. They looked at the adventures published by TSR - written by Gygax himself in many cases - and figured the point of D&D was to assault the lairs of monsters, put them to the sword, and then take their stuff.

That is a load of bullshit.

They could start by reading their own rules books. Your time frame Haffrung is 1974-1977? Read Volume 3 of OD&D, The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures. The entirety of the book, including the first pages describing the default of the underworld and its multiple levels and so on. Unless of course you are actually talking about AD&D, which only came out by 1978 of course, in which case I direct you to the Player's Handbook page 107 Successful Adventures which describes the default game play of the game with the group exploring, deciding on specific objectives, and those sections of the Dungeon Master's Guide, pertaining to the dungeon, restocking the dungeon, the creation and management of the campaign milieu. Maybe you skipped those parts and went straight for the attack matrixes, but that's a function of your personal experience - or lack thereof and seriously: it's OKAY to admit to ourselves that we were kids and didn't know what we were doing! - and not reflective of what's actually printed on the page, nor the the way other people than yourself and your buddies might have been playing the game in 74-77, or later, for that matter.

Wether you are talking about OD&D or AD&D, you are full of shit, Haffrung. You might be talking about some buddies of yours or yourself reading the books in diagonal, but you are certainly not talking about what's contained within them. You are projecting your own bias and construing them as generalities. I'm sorry. You are wrong.

PS: Holmes is 1977, the tail end of the period you think you are talking about, and it plugs directly into the AD&D game that came out directly after. See above. Moldvay is 1981, so it's completely irrelevant to the period concerned. Not to mention it's completely self-contained, apart from AD&D rules and content.

Quote from: Haffrung;689594They looked at the adventures published by TSR - written by Gygax himself in many cases - and figured the point of D&D was to assault the lairs of monsters, put them to the sword, and then take their stuff.

Not an unreasonable interpretation I have to say. At the time that's pretty much what we did.

As for the modules, Village of Hommlet and Temple of Elemental Evil describe a village complete with NPCs, people to trade with, hire as henchmen to travel through the Wilderness around, back and forth from the village, until you find the Moat house and or the Temple, with Nulb nearby, for a reason. It's actually a complete setting "Sandbox" in today's parlance that emphasizes what I was talking about. The factions of the Temple will react to the party. Try to go through the Temple in one go with no reactivity at all from the setting and your characters will die, which will be a relief to your players dying of boredom.

Ditto the Keep on the Borderlands, which comes with a Keep, multiple locations with stuff to find out or plug your own dungeon, back and forth exploring from the Keep, making it to the Caves of Chaos, turning the various factions against one another and/or whatnot. Try doing the whole caves in one go without going back to the Keep, without aid, leveling up because no training availble etc. Good luck with that.

G and D series are dangerous, and part of a wider world. Try to attack the steading with a frontal assault expecting to win "because hack and slash", and prepare to cry.

Tsojcanth is a whole mountainous region to explore. Good luck cleaning up the upper AND Lower caverns in one go.

And the A Series were tournament modules of the later AD&D era which weren't even authored by Gary Gygax, but Zeb Cook and Co. From 1980 on.

I'm puzzled as to the reasons you'd bring up products from 1980-83 to supposedly talk about 74-77. My guess is that it is what you know, or think you know and/or remember of those days, so you project those experiences and, since that's what you particularly experienced it must have been true through time warp for all D&D players of 74-77 too. Look: I'm sorry if your DM was terrible, didn't read the rules books and fudged the whole way through the modules in order to let your guys go through them all in one go, or until you guys quit out of boredom, whichever applies- which might explain why you had such a bad time playing them, by the way - but you are just projecting, here.

Quote from: jeff37923;689574OK, this just shows a complete misunderstanding of what CR actually did in relation to XP. And it has come up before, a lot.

Even in the beginning when the 3.0 PHB came out and had the 2000 Survival Kit in place that allowed you to start playing, CR gave XP for overcoming obstacles and you did not have to overcome them solely by combat. That is a very important distinction that gets ignored far too often, usually by someone trying to paint the game in a very different light.

My recollection is that there were XP awards for objectives and roleplaying and stuff like that, but they were miniscule compared to what you got from killing monsters. I guess it's possible I'm remembering it wrong. I played 3e for the duration of its run, although I didn't GM it, which may be relevant.

Quote from: Haffrung;689594During the game's boom years of 79 to 85, millions of people learned to play D&D from the classic modules...A series...Nothing in the background written for those modules indicated, or even implied, that the purpose of the adventure was to get in, find loot, and get out...

Did you never play A4, or simply forget?