Quote from: camazotz;342119It is weird; as an old vet, who started play with AD&D in 1980 (therefore not quite a true grognard, since I didn't start with the OD&D brown box) I think the fact that, no matter what the physical evidence of the era seems to suggest (i.e. lots of dungeon modules full of monsters) people just didn't play it as one string of combat encounters after another...in fact, 90% of the time I remember my early years of gaming being something like this:

Players: We pick the lock/break down the door/walk in to the room.

DM: Okay, five trolls are sitting around a card table playing cards. "Wot's this?!?!" One of them says, "Who do you think you are barging in to our flat?"

Players: Cool! We play cards with them/apologize and back out/parlay for the right to move to the next room/attack!

Basically, fighting was usually only one option; monsters didn't usually seem to attack unless provoked, or unless the module said so....which when you read many of those old modules, they often leave behavior and personality of NPCs and monsters up to the DM, something later years tended to erase.

But hey, YMMV and I have figured out from the current old-school movement that my game experiences from the 1980's may have been an exception to the rule, and that most of the grognards are all about methodical dungeon delving and Moria-like simulating.

halfrung

Look, I started running D&D in 1977. I was there. My group transferred to AD&D one book at at time as they were released, Monster Manual first! We were somewhat less dungeon focused than other groups, but not astonishingly so - players coming into my group had no problem adjusting. In 20 years of that campaign, running from D&D to AD&D to AD&D 2e and ending when 3E came out, we had about 5 "big" dungeons - i.e. more than a day to plow through - and maybe 10-20 mini-dungeons. The *vast* majority of our gaming was on the surface, in towns and cities and wilderness. Here's a secret which jibbajabba and camazotz let out of the bag: Encounter does not equal combat. What happened in an encounter could involve many things, only one of which was combat.

So, a word of advice. Don't try to tell people who were there what really happened! It's bad manners, and makes you look stupid. I don't think you are stupid, so you might actually care that you look that way. It's not like you are disputing things that happened in the Hundred Years War. There are actually a lot of us still around.

-clash

Added - and I never ran modules. GMs that ran modules were pretty much scorned by the GMs I knew. Maybe that's an important difference.

I started in 81. Dungeon smashing was what the game appeared to be about, how it was taught to my GM, and how I leaned D&D and AD&D... and what the modules showed. Not to mention being pretty much what the other groups I was aware of at the time were doing, too.

Our D&D games back then were over 95% combat. It was encouraged even in the rules and Gygax's spectacularly bad advice in Dragon. Puzzles and traps were the rest. If it wasn't a dungeon, it was a trek to/from a dungeon.

Real in character play didn't start for me until a couple years later.

But We did have a bit of off-the-rules wierdness. Like my COM 23 Elf. He seduced Lolth, made the save vs her COM 25, and stabbed her in the back mid coitus.

Quote from: flyingmice;342385The *vast* majority of our gaming was on the surface, in towns and cities and wilderness. Here's a secret which jibbajabba and camazotz let out of the bag: Encounter does not equal combat. What happened in an encounter could involve many things, only one of which was combat.

Sure. I get that. I've played whacks of D&D and spent hundreds of hours playing non-combat encounters. Though I do wonder how how your PCs earned the 1.2 million or so experience points it would take a party of 6 PCs from 7th level to 8th level without killing lots of things and taking lots of stuff. I get that you can earn experience from looting treasure without killing monsters, but I'm at a loss to imagine stealing millions of GP of goods with hardly any fighting.

Quote from: flyingmice;342385So, a word of advice. Don't try to tell people who were there what really happened!

You may want to direct that advice to the guys upthread who claimed that D&D didn't used to be mainly about fighting.

QuoteIt's not like you are disputing things that happened in the Hundred Years War. There are actually a lot of us still around.

And I'm one of them. Started with the Holmes basic set when I was nine.

QuoteAdded - and I never ran modules. GMs that ran modules were pretty much scorned by the GMs I knew. Maybe that's an important difference.

Probably is. But millions on millions of D&D players did run modules. In fact, for millions of millions of D&D players, modules is how they learned to play the game. While personal anecdotes will vary, that massive output of dungeon-based modules provides rather convincing evidence that yes, D&D was mostly about combat and dungeon-delving for a huge number of players.

Apparently I was not playing games like I thought I was. You know exactly what went on. Whatever you say. I must have imagined the whole thing. I'm out of here!

-clash

Quote from: Haffrung;342405Sure. I get that. I've played whacks of D&D and spent hundreds of hours playing non-combat encounters. Though I do wonder how how your PCs earned the 1.2 million or so experience points it would take a party of 6 PCs from 7th level to 8th level without killing lots of things and taking lots of stuff. I get that you can earn experience from looting treasure without killing monsters, but I'm at a loss to imagine stealing millions of GP of goods with hardly any fighting.



You may want to direct that advice to the guys upthread who claimed that D&D didn't used to be mainly about fighting.



And I'm one of them. Started with the Holmes basic set when I was nine.



Probably is. But millions on millions of D&D players did run modules. In fact, for millions of millions of D&D players, modules is how they learned to play the game. While personal anecdotes will vary, that massive output of dungeon-based modules provides rather convincing evidence that yes, D&D was mostly about combat and dungeon-delving for a huge number of players.

This is quite interesting there really does seem to be a split between the Module players and the non-module players. I wonder how that equates to toehr stuff... hmmm.
For me I had borrowed some AD&D stuff when I was 10 from a student my mum taught. This included Steading of the Hill Giant Chief and one of the Slave LOrds adventures A3 I think.. I had been playing Blue book basic for about 3 months at the time. We used the pregenned characters to try the adventures but generally found that they were illogical and only had one way of doing things. I think there was maybe a seminal moment when we played a module from White Dwarf which was all roleplay and puzzles with never little combat and what was there could be avoided (must have been in 81 sometime) and I though this is much more like the games I like. .
We did go back to dungeons briefly when Grimtooth's traps came out (82?) but only for a quick visit.
After that there would be dungeon bits in games but they were incidental to the plot.

I also wonder if there is any link to the guys that played moduels and the guys that houseruled and made up their own systems. We houserueld from day 2 or 3, which I assumed was the norm and I wrote my first game when I was 12, based on Ace Trucking from 2000AD. I wonder if the guys that played more expansive games and didn't use modules tend to have similar experiences.  

Well I don't think Clash will comment as he has indicated he is done with the thread but as for XP we used to run it two ways. Either at the end of the session the DM gave you Xp on a bit of paper or at the end of the quest you all got XP. This was generally more focused on achieving your objectives and roleplaying. I seem to recall a moment when a Good Magic User slept a bunch of kolbolds and then refused to kill them but rescued the farmer's daughter they had captured but gave her all the loot. The rules didn't allow for any experience from this but it was obviously much more of a heroic worthy act and so surely deserved some. There was also a time a 1st or maybe 2nd level party stumbled across a random monster that was a black dragon the DM ruled that we had stumbled into its lair, but he also determined it was young (2hp/dice) so the thief sneaked in and the fighter took up a position. The thief hit with a backstab... backstabbing a dragon go figure and the fighter landed a 20 so the thing was dead. Then the DM randomly generated its horde of treasure and the party just got more xp for that encounter than for the previous 3 or 4 sessions. Those two things meant we binned the xp rules as written by the time we were 11 or 12.

Oh and I think the Millions and millions of module players is a slight exageration the cost if nothing else.. I was 11 got 2 quid a week pocket money a module would cost 7 or 8 pounds if I could find them in a shop or I coudl just make it up which was free... but of the 20 or so kids I knew at the time all devout players.. I don;t know anyone that bought more than 1 module

Quote from: flyingmice;342424Apparently I was not playing games like I thought I was. You know exactly what went on. Whatever you say. I must have imagined the whole thing. I'm out of here!

Dude, where did I say that? When millions of people play a game, you're going to get all kinds of play styles. All I'm saying is for a huge number of them - yes, I'll go out on a limb and say a majority - combat made up most of the gameplay.

The sample adventure in every edition of D&D I've seen is a dungeon. The most extensive examples of play in every book are examples of combat. Most of the adventures in the Dragon (before Dungeon came out) were dungeon complexes, not political dramas or murder-mysteries. Book after book after book published in the early days of the game were dungeon chock full of monsters. There are no rules for level advancement other than killing and looting.

I don't see how anyone honestly looking to find the norm in play styles could reach another conclusion. Again, the norm - not everybody. Not you obviously. And probably not hundreds of thousands of other players. But most.

Quote from: jibbajibba;342127Yeah my games were a bit like that and as I said I got out of the dungeon (occassional visits as part of bigger campaigns) and into the city.

<4e gripe>My problem with 4e, and I have read of it but not played it, is that it actually limits the game by making all PCs good at combat. A strange complaint but ... For me there was a point in 2e with Skills and Powers were D&D nearly got to be 'perfect' D&D. The idea that you get a number of points to build a custom class and you advance in that class. A thief which some maigc at higher levels a dex based fighter etc etc With it you could have built balanced classes for everything , want to build a pirate that is specific to your setting. A gladiator class etc etc. Now Skills and Powers was fatally flawed and poorly executed but with it there was the germ of a great idea.
Now when 3e came out this was dropped and the game , in my mind changed too much. I couldn't just pick up an 2e character and move to 3e, which I could do from 1e to 2e (with minor tweaks) and the combat grid became more important. So we didn't move to 3e. 4e is just this and more to my mind.  

I've thought about that, too. The main problem 4E presents to a story-focused game is that if you do want to play a less combat-focused character, you really can't, unless you simply choose to act that way in contradiction to your abilities.

Techincally, one could build some power sets for a given class that de-emphasize direct combat, but then you'd be messing up the system's balance, which would be okay only if the DM is savvy enough to account for that. As a result, this is one of the reasons that even though I run and enjoy 4E (and my players love it) I have embraced Pathfinder for my "more serious" stories that might require characters who are not all aimed at beating stuff up.

My 4E games can get quite convoluted and often have no combat at all; but this is a trait brought to the table by the players and the scenario as I design it; the game itself definitely provides the bulk of the rule support for beat-em-ups, no doubt about that. It sounds like they are working on changing that, or at least throwing out a bone over at WotC, though, such as with their exploits for skills and such. We'll see if it really works out that way.

Quote from: flyingmice;342424Apparently I was not playing games like I thought I was. You know exactly what went on. Whatever you say. I must have imagined the whole thing. I'm out of here!

-clash

Clash, you're getting pissy because we point out your perception wasn't universal. You're the one claiming D&D wasn't about the combat; that's an extraordinary claim, demanding extraordinary proof.

The bulk of the evidence is that the majority view was it was about the carnage, with some groups delving into something beyond character scale  combat & traps.

Even now, a great many, if not most, D&D games are about the slayage.

"Bulk of the evidence"...?

You mean, "everybody says"?

Yeah, okay.

We didn't do all combats when we first played... and we were 12, so our games weren't exactly thespy sophistication, if you know what I mean.

Even most early published dungeon bashes were more about the puzzle solving and exploration than the combat IMHO.

Quote from: jadrax;343054Even most early published dungeon bashes were more about the puzzle solving and exploration than the combat IMHO.

Let's look at all of the monochrome TSR dungeons. I'll give my impression of combat/non-combat.

White Plume Mountain. Lots of puzzle solving and lots of combat. Around 15 combat encounters (allowing for a few wandering monsters) in a dungeon that should take 2 sessions to play.
50/50

In Search of the Unknown. Great dungeon. Lots of atmosphere, exploration, and puzzle-solving. Kind of hard to rate for combat encounters, given the way the DM customizes the monsters. Still, going by the guidelines you'll probably have 20-30 combat encounters in the 2 level dungeon.
50/50

Tomb of Horrors. A special case. Definitely more traps than monsters.
20/80

Steading of the Hill Giant Chief. Other than a bit of negotiation with some orcs, combat all the way.
80/20

Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl. Pure hackfest.
90/10

Hall of the Fire Giant King. Probably 50 combat encounters in that sucker.
80/20

Descent into the Depths. Nothing but combat, and some overland (underground) travel.
90/10

Shrine of the Kua-Toa. Depends how it's played. You're probably going to have several combat encounters leading up to the city, and then one or two big fights.
60/40

Vault of the Drow. More of a campaign setting than an adventure. The amount of combat will vary by group. The Fane of Lolth is going to see some heavy combat, though.
50/50

Keep on the Borderlands. Take out the monsters and there isn't much of an adventure to speak of, just a bunch of empty caves. And this is the most played RPG adventure of all time.
80/20

Village of Hommlet. The village of itself will be mostly non-combat (though in playing that game with three different groups, most of them ended up killing a lot of NPCs in the Inn, robbing from villagers, taking a run at the tower, etc.) And the moathouse itself is all combat.
60/40

Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. Another great dungeon that is more about the setting than the monsters. You're still looking at 15 or so combat encounters in 2-4 sessions, and most of those encounters are very tough.
30/70

So not all combat. And yeah, probably more exploration and puzzle-solving than in modern D&D adventures. But I stand by my original assertion: If a group went through all of the those dungeons, it's hard to imagine most of the sessions being mainly non-combat.

And if we throw in popular modules like the A series and the Temple of Elemental Evil, and Judges Guilds classics such as Caverns of Thracia and Dark Tower, the ratio shifts even more to the combat side.