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Message: [QUOTE="lunacity, post: 68222, member: 36814"] It's also hard to talk about D&D coherently when it now refers to so many different things that appear similar on the surface - OD&D, B/X, AD&D, 3e, 5e, Pathfinder, etcetera, etcetera - there are actually huge shifts in the mechanics, playstyles, and fantasy/gaming influences in each generation. For example - AD&D has many strange rules that make no sense for a DM with four PCs at his table. This is because some of the early campaigns were played at wargaming clubs that had two or three DMs and 50 or more PCs in the same shared world - each night an adventuring party of 6-8 people would go dungeon delving, and the next evening another group, and so on. Time in-game advanced at the same rate as time IRL - 1 day is 1 day. Sometimes a rival adventuring party would clear out a dungeon before you! Domain play also makes more sense in this context - you would be competing with other teams. Players would also keep a 'stable' of active characters - if a PC wasn't fully healed, you might keep him in a safe area and send out another character you had rolled up. "YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT," wrote Gygax - he was thinking of a shared world where dozens of people are adventure together. We think of a campaign as something else in the modern sense, which has caused no small amount of confusion online. Charisma is another thing that changed in function - in early D&D, CHA is how you recruit and manage hirelings. Many early D&D campaigns would have the PCs outnumbered by hirelings 5 to 1 - the were necessary for moving loot, testing traps, distracting monsters, filling in as PCs when your character died, and so on. OD&D also had more of a focus on reaction rolls - with good CHA, you had a chance to negotiate when you rolled for an encouter. Last, but certainly not least - early D&D awarded XP for [I]gold retrieved from the dungeon[/I], not for killing monsters. This completely changes the calculus of dungeon diving - when fighting does not directly reward you, you start thinking about how you can sneak around, outwit, and trick opponents when possible - fighting is a risky activity. The 'murderhobo' stereotype comes about from these changes in the rules. (Idea for a future article- D&D's influence on Japanese media - games, manga, and anime. It's unreal to see how large an impact Wizardry made on Japan.) Also also - check out the Japanese Rules Cyclopedia! (The BECMI rules, for the most part.) The art is fantastic! [URL='https://mystara.thorfmaps.com/appendix-j/rules-cyclopedia/']Part 1[/URL] [URL='https://mystara.thorfmaps.com/appendix-j/b10-b12/']Part 2[/URL] [/QUOTE]

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