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“Guess which number between 1 and 100 I am thinking of right now and your party survives the trash compactor trap.” 😂 Agree it ain’t easy. Strangely it requires empathy for your group to design challenges that nicely match their ability. It definitely can’t be some obscure puzzle that no one in...

Yeah, in looking at that article, I guess we played pretty much OSR style, though we definitely evolved our style over time. Challenge to both characters and "player skill" Mix and match rules and abilities and tactics and monsters to keep challenge fresh Minimizing creation of new rules...

My sense of Greyhawk when we played in it, was that everything felt much more distant, silo'd, pocketed and dangerous. There were other lands and states and kingdoms out there, and you heard lots of rumors, but to adventure that far to see what was going on there was a big deal. Lots of wild...

Ooh, I like that one.

Yeah, not really familiar with the whole history or agenda of OSR, despite being as old school as old school can get.

The idea is to get players and DMs away from hiding behind complicated rules, or using complicated rules as gotchas, and pushing towards "the answer is not on your character sheet, or on p. 237 paragraph 3. It's inside your noggin."

Ah, so added complexity and crunch doesn't equate to added challenge. It makes things more challenging for players to look up rules, that's for sure! :p I think folks are discussing ways to challenge PCs and their players, not necessarily with more and more complex rule systems and monsters and...

What was really bad? The number of new monsters?

I think we all get into trouble (even since the hobby began) when the words "how games should be run" are spoken. That was one of the many things Gary got raked over the coals for! :ROFLMAO: I know he was trying to set down some guidelines for folks -- this was all very new to everyone, and he...

Yep, it's actually a real outlier of a dungeon, and even uncharacteristic of Gygax's other adventures. I actually think of Keep on the Borderlands and Village of Hommlet as much better examples of early D&D. And Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan and Against the Slavelords as the best examples of...

You sorta have to remember that all this was being developed in real time back then. Gary had his own campaign, which had seriously veteran players who he was working hard to challenge, and at the same time writing general advice to the public that often had not caught up to where he was in his...

He was raked over the coals on a regular basis back in those days! :ROFLMAO:

Well, having lived and played through all that, I do remember it being very much a note of conversation in Dragon articles both from Gary and others, about the proper amount of challenge, notes on being impartial and fair, not falling into the killer DM trap, giving players plenty of clues, and...

To be clear, I would have liked that internal wizard for the cover.

They should do a Ravenloft game.

We used to do an INT roll of some kind to see if the PC knew some rumor about a monster or monster ability. If the player knew, well the player might still be wrong because the GM might have changed something. Would still do the INT check. I suppose there were some early spats and cries of ‘not...

I was thinking more like when a player says they want to use some observation skill, I usually let them roll to notice something, but yeah these succeed almost all the time.

I actually don't allow players to push the I Solve The Mystery button, though I'll give them plenty of clues with rolls.

The 'arms race' aspect of all this was really in the early days of the hobby. When it was assumed only way to challenge a party was to devise new monsters the party hadn't encountered yet, or the players had bought and read all the books. As the hobby grew, there came more creative ways of...

The difficult part is to devise fairly discoverable clues and puzzles so as not to be opaque but not so easy and transparent that it is not a challenge. Many will argue that Tomb of Horrors leans to opaque, but then Gygax was running that adventure for seasoned vets. Mixing and changing monster...