Game vs. Setting

[BeZurKur]

badger2305 said:

How it works and how things are resolved start with adventuring and exploration. Past that, it's up to the referee.

Do you mean it is up to the referee to take the implicit setting that is supported through the rules and apply it in a different environment? Your list from vol. III seems to imply that. If so, I agree. I also see Franks point that applying the logic of dungeon design to an outside environment will yield unrealistic results. However I don't have any trouble suspending by disbelief to accept that dungeons are built as sprawling mazes and in escalating difficulty, so the same design for the wilderness or city is okay by me. Both are just as absurd but great game mechanics.

Or, do you mean that because the game is so lite and open-ended, the referee can easily add to it to accommodate "higher level" pursuits? This is less my style. At this point, it seems to me everyone will either be playing free-form through negotiation on the player level, or working in a vacuum to create another game. In either case, it will cease to be D&D.

[James Maliszewski]

bezurkur said:

I also see Franks point that applying the logic of dungeon design to an outside environment will yield unrealistic results. However I don't have any trouble suspending by disbelief to accept that dungeons are built as sprawling mazes and in escalating difficulty, so the same design for the wilderness or city is okay by me. Both are just as absurd but great game mechanics.

I'm not sure why anyone would necessarily use the logic of dungeon design and apply it either to the wilderness or the city. Nothing in OD&D implies that this was intended. A quick scan of the wilderness encounter tables, both in Volume 3 and the expanded ones in Eldritch Wizardry show no such logic at work. You're just as likely to encounter a dragon as a man in most environments, for example.

As noted earlier, wilderness adventures, from the earliest days of the hobby, were always noteworthy for being more dangerous than dungeon ones, because you could never be sure that the encounters would follow the "logic" of dungeons. Certainly, you can design wilderness encounters this way and I have, but it only works to a certain extent, after which, if we go solely by the rules, we just have to accept how deadly unpredictable they can be. Take a look at Judges Guild's old Wilderlands materials and it's clear to me that the wilderness is a very different animal (no pun intended) from dungeons, when it comes to design.

[James Maliszewski]

ffilz said:

I don't think it's possible to play a logical "outside the dungeon" campaign (that doesn't just look like a dungeon with different props) without starting to ignore the rules, and that's what I've seen.

I'm curious: what rules would you be ignoring by playing an outside the dungeon campaign?

[ffilz]

I'm not sure I can articulate why I have an issue with outside the dungeon play as illustrated by the rules of D&D.

I acknowledge that there are rules. There are rules on travel, encounters, and constructing strongholds.

I do have a problem with the encounter rules. I just can't see a logical world existing with those rules. The game strongly suggests people of PC caliber (with character classes and levels) are rare, yet, no one could hope to travel from one city to the next without having high level characters to defend them (and even then, it's quite possible the normal men in a caravan would get slaughtered).

Beyond encounters which feed into the D&D combat system, the rules have almost no support whatsoever. GMs who want to handle diplomacy or other "social" encounters are left to make up their own rules. What I have seen happen consistently is that such rules IGNORE the fundamental aspects of the game system. It doesn't matter what level your character is. It doesn't matter what his attributes are. It doesn't matter what magic items he has. Nothing on his character sheet matters. What matters is how well the player can convince the GM, and the player doesn't get to leverage his character sheet or anything in the rule book. This is what BeZurKur is referring to as "free form."

So sure, you can make a game of rolling those random encounters and such and "play by the rules." But such play is just a crap shoot unless the PCs are of high enough level that they can whup anything on the encounter tables (in which case play will probably be pretty boring). Again, free form play might come in if the players try stuff outside the rules like hiding under rocks and such, but then the play will be dominated by free form, not by the rules.

In a dungeon setting, sure, free form does come into play, but the free form is also somewhat constrained. The lay of the land is mapped out by the GM ahead of time, all that's left to free form is details. And as long as the GM places encounters in the dungeon reasonably, the players can leverage their character sheet (class, level, attributes, magic items) and the rules, picking fights they can win. There are even decent rules for determining if fleeing an encounter is successful (the efficacy of dropping food or treasure [though I guess one could apply those in the wilderness also).

Is it possible to play outside the dungeon? Sure. Did the Greyhawk and Blackmoor campaigns have outside the dungeon play? Sure, but the rules for those campaigns are not in the rule book. So if one wants to play a relatively pure D&D, and not rely on coming up with an entire new body of rules, I don't see how to make outside the dungeon play truly work.

What I fell into for my own play outside the dungeon in the past was presenting encounters that were tuned to the PC's levels. And I never got into the social stuff much (for one thing, it's not something I'm strong in, but for another, until I played Dogs in the Vinyard, I had not yet seen a rule system for social encounter play that worked). Tuning encounters to the PCs doesn't make for a very interesting game of D&D since the players have little decision making to rely on. In 3.x, the players get to design their characters, which can work. How good IS your 5th level D&D 3.x character? In a system I ran in college, any magic item could be purchased in town, and there was a huge strategic element of what items to buy, and a similarly important tactical element of when to use them (most items had limited charges). Both D&D 3.x and that college system also have significantly more detailed combat systems that also made for more tactical options in combat.

I'd be real curious how Blackmoor play occurs now. We know that prof. Barker relies on very abstract rules for Tekumel (you roll a die, and if you roll well in his eyes, based on what he knows of your character and the situation, then you succeed, otherwise you don't - it sounds like an extremely arbitrary system and probably is fun because Barker is a good story teller). Unfortunately the professor's game is not remotely portable. You could not pick up his notes and have any assurance that you could begin to replace him.

Frank

[badger2305]

ffilz said:

Beyond encounters which feed into the D&D combat system, the rules have almost no support whatsoever. GMs who want to handle diplomacy or other "social" encounters are left to make up their own rules. What I have seen happen consistently is that such rules IGNORE the fundamental aspects of the game system.

If I understand you correctly, you are dismissing the idea because you've never seen it done well or properly. But that doesn't invalidate the idea - it simply means that previous examples don't measure up. Why not simply come up with a better system? "House rules" are an acknowledged way of dealing with this kind of situation - why can't a referee design such a system?

Is it possible to play outside the dungeon? Sure. Did the Greyhawk and Blackmoor campaigns have outside the dungeon play? Sure, but the rules for those campaigns are not in the rule book. So if one wants to play a relatively pure D&D, and not rely on coming up with an entire new body of rules, I don't see how to make outside the dungeon play truly work.

"Relatively pure D&D" - that sounds like you are suggesting playing D&D "by the book" - is that what you mean? I suspect you mean that referees ought to take their cues from the material presented in the rules as printed (and not slavishly follow them - that would be dull!) If that's the case, when you look at Volume Three, over half of it deals with adventuring outside of the dungeon. So I guess I'm confused by what you mean then by "relatively pure D&D". What it sounds like it is that Volume Three includes material you don't understand and don't want to use in your own game play. For your own campaign, that's fine - but there are clear suggestions made in the rules for game play outside of dungeons, so that's part of "relatively pure D&D" or so it seems to me. Put another way, what it sounds like is this: "I don't understand that other part of the rules, so to play the game 'correctly' I'm going to ignore it." Is that what you mean?

Let me quote from the Afterward in Volume Three:

"There are unquestionably areas which have been glossed over. While we deeply regret the necessity, space requires that we put in the essentials only, and the trimmings will oftimes have to be added the referee and his players. We have attempted to furnish an ample framework, and building should be both easy and fun. In this light, we urge you to refrain from writing for rules interpretations or the like unless you are absolutely at a loss, for everything herein is fantastic, and the best way is to decide how you would like it to be, and then make it just that way! On the other hand, we are not loathe to answer your questions, but why have us do any more of your imagining for you? Write to us and tell about your additions, ideas, and what have you. We could always do with a bit of improvement in our refereeing."

To me, this suggests that referees were expected to come up with their own rules to cover situations not listed. And since wilderness, city, and even otherworldly adventures were envisioned in the rules, this logically means that those areas were left to the "referee and his players" to figure out. It doesn't mean they shouldn't go there, because the rules were less detailed than those for dungeons - precisely the opposite! Those areas were left for you to work your own imagination on, and come up with answers that work for you and your campaign.

Since there is general recognition that "house rules" are an expected part of playing D&D, what is to stop anyone from filling in those gaps and coming up with a really great campaign? They might even share those rules with other referees and players - and thus fulfill the suggestion made in the Afterword.

[ffilz]

I guess I would love to be proved wrong, that a system that allowed outside the dungeon play to work without bypassing the core of the system. I've actually thought occasionally about creating a system where social conflict is resolved by reducing your opponents hit points to zero by social attacks. But I'm not sure whether that would really accomplish anything.

But I guess why I'm not interested in trying to make such house rules work myself is that I'd rather look to other game systems if I want something different than a mega-dungeon campaign. I personally don't see the value of making D&D work for anything, as long as I write enough house rules.

Frank

[James Maliszewski]

ffilz said:

I guess I would love to be proved wrong, that a system that allowed outside the dungeon play to work without bypassing the core of the system.

I still don't understand why you are equating expanding on existing rules or filling in the gaps in the existing rules with "bypassing the core of the system." Do you feel that any house ruling is bypassing the core of the system? If that's the case, I'll disagree, but I can see where you're coming from, but if you only think it illegitimate in the case of non-dungeon play, I can't make sense of it.

[ffilz]

What I am against is what I have seen done to "get out of the dungeon" which inevitably leads to basically ignoring the character sheet. I would not be against expanding the system to allow for "outside the dungeon" play that was done so in such a way that the stuff on the character sheet is still relevant. Oh, we might need to add a couple things, but if your level and hit points and such aren't relevant, something seems wrong to me.

The trouble I have with the wilderness encounter tables and system as presented in book 3 is that the sheer randomness of the encounters makes level sort of irrelevant, in that low level PCs would be insane to run around in the wilderness.

Everything is also compounded in that when we leave the dungeon, we invariably want the world to make more sense. So we have villages with normal men. And then we try and reconcile the wilderness encounter tables with these villages. Or we try and figure out what to do when the PCs decide to kill the village and take it's treasure. I guess that's where I have the real problem, D&D as presented in everything up to the 2nd half of book 3 is about killing things and taking their treasure, but extending this play beyond the dungeon is problematical. And to fix it, we introduce a whole new layer and mode of play, a mode of play that disdains the play that worked so well in the dungeon (and we also go back and re-design the dungeon...).

The trouble is not extending the game, the trouble is so totally changing the game that I find it impossible to consider the extended and changed game the same game. This quest of course has lead to three decades of game development, hundreds of different games. And yet, most games still devote half their rule book to a combat system (and then often tell you not to use it in some way or another - often by suggesting resorting to combat is a last resort or due to power gaming or whatever).

In the past bunch of years, there have been new games that have been designed from the ground up to create a different sort of play. Those games can be really fun. But just because such games exist, doesn't mean that the occasional game of D&D in the dungeon isn't fun.

As to ignoring the rules in the 2nd half of book 3. Ok, so I'm ignoring part of the game. I just don't care to try and extend the game to make sense of those rules. Now if someone comes out with a game that has a dungeon component and a wilderness component, and even uses D&D for the dungeon component, well, that's cool and I might be happy to play it. But I'm not sure I'd call the wilderness component D&D.

I have suggested that one way to get wilderness adventures that work within the D&D system is to lay out the wilderness like a dungeon. Make the Dark Woods "5th level" make the Plains of Death be "10th level." This would allow players to choose their risk (hmm, we're 6th level, let's go to the Dark Woods). But such a system of course would ignore the encounter charts in the 2nd half of book 3, and might not use much of the rules at all (the movement and getting lost rules would still be perfectly usable though). I'm still not sure how to run towns in such a situation, though perhaps you could give the towns levels also, or sections of cities levels, but that might be harder. And such a system still will get laid aside when the players decide to spend a whole session in town just talking.

Frank

[Thigru Thorkissen]

ffilz said:

I have suggested that one way to get wilderness adventures that work within the D&D system is to lay out the wilderness like a dungeon. Make the Dark Woods "5th level" make the Plains of Death be "10th level." This would allow players to choose their risk (hmm, we're 6th level, let's go to the Dark Woods). But such a system of course would ignore the encounter charts in the 2nd half of book 3, and might not use much of the rules at all (the movement and getting lost rules would still be perfectly usable though). I'm still not sure how to run towns in such a situation, though perhaps you could give the towns levels also, or sections of cities levels, but that might be harder. And such a system still will get laid aside when the players decide to spend a whole session in town just talking.

I think that rather than arbitrarily assigning levels, a "zone of influence" system could be created where the farther away from "civilized lands" (which have been cleaned out and are under control of a city or castle) the party goes, the deeper the "dungeon level" for encounters.

The "deep and wild woods" really has a meaning. A party could wander from town to town on some roads and not expect to encounter anything worse than small parties of humanoids. However, if they go to explore places unknown and "far from the civilization of man" then ogres, trolls and dragons might not be too uncommon...

tauman

[driver]

The Dragon issue #40 (I think) had an article called "Believe It or Not, Fantasy Has Reality." It had a section (possibly for Chivalry and Sorcery, I don't have it in front of me) with mechanics for "Home" and "Wyrd" areas. Your magic was more powerful in Wyrd areas, but you'd also run into nastier creatures.

[geoffrey]

philotomy said:

Heck, published materials sometimes advise you to read the module through once to get a general idea, and then read it again while making your own notes...

When I first glanced at that I thought it said, "then read it again while holding your own nose". LOL!

Goodness knows that lots of modules stink.

[calithena]

Lot of good thoughts in this thread.

At the risk of being non-dogmatic, I think you can play a game that's genuinely OD&D with just dungeons, and I think that you can play a game that's genuinely OD&D with much more than dungeons.

Now, that said, I'm a big proponent of the DIY thing, of homebrewed fantasy worlds, and of characters and challenges and playstyles that transform over the course of a campaign. When I was a lad, the big topic of conversation was always "how it works in my world" - that is, we as DMs all had our own worlds, with our own house rules, races, etc., and this was more or less expected. There was this sense of a 'calling' that the serious DM was also a fantasist, not just a dungeon designer - a sense that Gary supports here and there in the text of the LBBs (where it's minimal) and the AD&D DMG.

As far as the implied 'different high level of play' style, that was always there as a possibility too. Frank's right that this often involved freeform or house rules, but still the possibility of this kind of play was in some sense part of the 'implied system' of the rules - unfinished but there, the level titles and castle pieces in the equipment lists suggesting that you would become something more than what you started. Mentzer's boxed sets came closest to realizing this idea of changing focus over the course of play, though even there more could have been done, I think.

So I guess I think that the people who are being a little narrow on this thread are not right if they want to say that that's ALL D&D was, but on the other hand you're still really playing OD&D if you're racking up skulls and gold pieces in dungeons.

Was this useful, badger? Did you have some more specific issues you'd like me to follow up on?

I do agree that there was an idea that people make up their own setting suggested in the original rules, but this could be pretty minimal and still allow you to be 'really playing' OD&D.

[BeZurKur]

This is my take: good games have themes. They may be implicit or explicit, but they all have them. Themes are necessary for a good game because they help guide play. The theme for D&D, as I see it, centers around whether adventuring will lead to power & wealth, or will it lead to death. The mechanics reinforce this by rewarding wealth on a mechanical level through XP: power (levels) and wealth are tied together.

Not a theme, but a method or vehicle to it, is OD&D's rules lite approach. You can transplant the method to any other game, but without the theme and reward mechanism, there is no guidance to how you should play it.

The game also adds the role-play element through alignments, but they are simple and do not interfere with the theme. I get the impression that the game intended to have players of mixed alignments. This isn’t a problem as long as they all remain true to the theme. I also don’t think that Law = Good and Chaos = Evil. If GG meant good and evil, why wouldn’t he simply say Good and Evil? Having Lawful and Chaotic characters in a party shouldn’t be a game-stopping problem. Having Good and Evil characters is a serious problem.

Put it all together: theme (to guide goal), vehicle (to guide play), and alignment (to guide roleplay) and you have Dungeons and Dragons. I didn’t mention a dungeon but that is the easiest environment to run: it is not the mandatory one. If the only difference between the wilderness and dungeon is the spectrum of encounters in the wilderness, that isn’t much of a difference. I can just as easily include Beholders in level one Wandering Monsters charts. The significant difference between them is color. However, if we make the theme of the game a political one, then we run the risk of eliminating OD&D’s original theme. That’s not to say we shouldn’t have politics; only that we should keep the original theme (pursuit of power and wealth) intact.

If we change the theme, it becomes like AD&D 2nd edition; if we change the vehicle, it becomes like 3.x. I’m tempted to say changing alignments makes it AD&D 1st edition. It is that fine-tuning and specialization that locks play and is the first real departure from OD&D.

So what about all the references to make OD&D your own? They’re still valid, but making it too much your own and it stops being OD&D. That isn’t bad; it just is. Personally, I house-rule on basis-by-basis. That’s how I still keep it OD&D without adding layers upon an already sound and complete structure.

This post could probably also go in the “How much can you change OD&D”, but I think the wilderness and dungeon references also keep it valid here.

[James Maliszewski]

bezurkur said:

I get the impression that the game intended to have players of mixed alignments. This isn’t a problem as long as they all remain true to the theme. I also don’t think that Law = Good and Chaos = Evil. If GG meant good and evil, why wouldn’t he simply say Good and Evil? Having Lawful and Chaotic characters in a party shouldn’t be a game-stopping problem. Having Good and Evil characters is a serious problem.

This has been discussed in a separate thread but it's pretty clear by implication that Law generally does equate to Good and Chaos to Evil. With very exceptions (most of them in very late OD&D supplements), there are no examples of evil beings on the side of Law and all Chaotic creatures, with the exception of Men, are inimical monsters. Chaotic clerics are "anti-clerics" who cause harm rather than heal and the text throughout elides "Chaos" and "evil."

Gary almost certainly used these terms in homage to Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, where Law is even equated with the Christian Church. The more relativist approach from Moorcock is another way to use these terms, but I don't think they had much influence over OD&D's alignment system.

[Finarvyn]

ffilz said:

I do have a problem with the encounter rules. I just can't see a logical world existing with those rules. The game strongly suggests people of PC caliber (with character classes and levels) are rare, yet, no one could hope to travel from one city to the next without having high level characters to defend them (and even then, it's quite possible the normal men in a caravan would get slaughtered).

Well, we know that combat is abstracted to the point where each "to hit" roll might not represent individual weapon strikes as much as a general amount of damage scored in a given amount of time....

Perhaps encounters are the same way. In literature we often find that "power attracts power" and important characters often encoutner each other in spite of probabilities that contend that there's just no way they would meet up. What if you suppose that encounters are also abstracted so that we ignore the boring merchant found on the road and simply skip ahead to the bandits lurking around the corner. iT's not that the other things aren't out there, but we ignore them because they're too mundane. We would see the merchant and keep moving....

Just a thought.

[calithena]

Your viewpoint is sensible, BeZurKur, but I guess I don't agree, in the sense that I don't think OD&D does have as narrow a theme as you suggest (though that 'theme' is part of the game's core, it's not the only part).

I do think this discussion is replaying history a little bit, and not a good part of RPG history either - we're on the border of the 'roleplaying vs. rollplaying'/'gamist vs. simulationist' battle of the late seventies and early eighties in this thread. My continued attraction to OD&D doesn't come from preferring one side of this battle to the other and thinking OD&D is on my side, it comes from rejecting the whole dichotomy in the first place.

So I'm down on the side of 'let a thousand flowers blossom,' I guess. I do think it will lead to total disaster for this site and movement if we start laying down the law about what's OD&D or not. In my book if a few people want to show up at my house and pretend to be at a noble court by speaking in faux-flowery language and dressing up in costumes, and we locate that relative to my campaign maps and don't roll any dice, that's playing OD&D if they want it to be. And if people want to move counters around a tile dungeon and refer to characters in the third person and treat it like a boardgame, that's playing OD&D too, if they want it to be. And if some other people want to make weird hybrid rules where the characters have been caught by a cruel vampire and they have to accumulate sufficient Love to overcome their Weariness and Self-Loathing before they can start throwing down with d20s and +2 magic swords to kill him, that can be OD&D too.

Going out and playing basketball, working at your job, eating dinner, those things aren't OD&D. The rest, I'm pretty much happy to say come on in and play, maybe we'll be able to work together as a group and maybe we won't, but I won't tell you you don't have just as much right to the activity and it's name as I do.

[ffilz]

admin said:

Perhaps encounters are the same way. In literature we often find that "power attracts power" and important characters often encoutner each other in spite of probabilities that contend that there's just no way they would meet up. What if you suppose that encounters are also abstracted so that we ignore the boring merchant found on the road and simply skip ahead to the bandits lurking around the corner. iT's not that the other things aren't out there, but we ignore them because they're too mundane. We would see the merchant and keep moving....

Something like that is the rationale I started using in college. That led me down the road of "appropriate" encounters for the PCs. Now that made a fine game, but as I've mentioned before, that eliminates the balancing of risk from the player's arsenal of decisions.

There certainly are ways to make "outside the dungeon" work, I guess it's just my preference at this point not to try and do that kind of game with D&D because there's too much to hand wave or write new rules for, meanwhile, the mega-dungeon is perfectly supported by the rules, and incidentally, has fallen out of favor with more recent games (despite some folks attempts to do so with 3.x).

I have also come to feel that it makes sense to play a game in the style the game best supports, and if I want a different style, to use a game more suited to that style. Sometimes it makes sense to tweak a game, but if I find myself re-writing or adding whole segments of the game, then I start to think perhaps I should be using a different game that already supports the play style I want. Of course sometimes it's also fun to see what kind of different play style, especially in the form of setting or genre, can be done with a given rule set, so remaking D&D as a science fiction game seems like a good idea, but I would expect to run "dungeons" with that game, not star spanning diplomacy.

Frank

[badger2305]

ffilz said:

I have also come to feel that it makes sense to play a game in the style the game best supports, and if I want a different style, to use a game more suited to that style. Sometimes it makes sense to tweak a game, but if I find myself re-writing or adding whole segments of the game, then I start to think perhaps I should be using a different game that already supports the play style I want.

Except that where this discussion started was a realization that OD&D - unlike other, later RPGs - specifically invited and expected a certain amount of modifications and elaborations. (In some ways, a conscious attitude not unlike Calithena's "let a thousand flowers bloom" approach). This sense of incompleteness sets OD&D apart from other games, and encourages referees to move beyond the framework simply as presented. You don't have to do that, but "staying in the dungeon" was never the only intention for what AD&D was supposed to be.

[ffilz]

Granted, however, a game saying "you can expand this game however you want" doesn't mean the game actually supports anything in the world. It is just pointing out that it's ok with the author if you expand the game.

We have kind of gone astray of the original question though haven't we...

Frank

[badger2305]

Frank, you seem to regard the open-ended character of OD&D as relatively unimportant. However - as I said at the beginning of this conversation - it's not unimportant, it is actually a key element of the game. And it's not far afield from the topic of discussion - it's part of the grounding for that discussion. You seem to be missing that.

To me, the argument you keep making is that since you don't understand part of OD&D, you simply won't use it. That's fine - but stop trying to tell me that wilderness adventures, city adventures, and even adventures in other worlds are somehow not part of OD&D, because they are.

Ultimately, I'm making a case for expanding the imaginative possibilities of OD&D. You seem to be making a case for limiting that scope. Unless we've got further things to say about that particular side of the debate, let's acknowledge our difference and move on.

[pjork]

calithena said:

Going out and playing basketball, working at your job, eating dinner, those things aren't OD&D. The rest, I'm pretty much happy to say come on in and play, maybe we'll be able to work together as a group and maybe we won't, but I won't tell you you don't have just as much right to the activity and it's name as I do.

Your outrageous inclusionary ideas will start us down the slippery slope to everyone getting along and enjoying themselves.

[calithena]

(post deleted)

[BeZurKur]

jamesm said:

This has been discussed in a separate thread but it's pretty clear by implication that Law generally does equate to Good and Chaos to Evil.

I believe Law and Chaos are poor synonyms for Good and Evil, but I concede the point. That alignments are a mechanic to guide roleplay is still valid, however; it just has a more narrow application.

calithena said:

I do think it will lead to total disaster for this site and movement if we start laying down the law about what's OD&D or not.

I sincerely apologize if that is how I'm coming across. I recognize my take on the game is just that: my take. I'm not trying to force it onto others. I find I run my best games by deconstructing the rules and putting them back to understand the relationships. I can only operate with rules I'm given. Even when house-ruling, I make sure to operate under the context of the existing rules.

You are right we disagree on the scope of the game, and that's totally cool. I prefer a more defined expectation when someone mentions a game. I enjoy games of politics and intrigue, but I'd like to know that going into it in case I'm in the mood for something else. Good language and exact terms help me with that, but I now recognize that someone running an OD&D game may be running something entirely different than how I run OD&D. I'd have more dialog to understand the game they're running.

In this aspect, I'm firmly in the same camp with Frank: I will keep the game as close to the printed rules and follow those guidelines. If I decide to play a different style of game, I'd use rules that already facilitate that kind of play.

[dwayanu]

I think the extreme danger and unpredictability of Wilderness vs. Underworld is clearly part of the original conception. To the extent that it makes rational sense, it seems to imply a Dark Age kind of setting. That also works to a degree for the Dungeons.

Commerce through the wilderness is possible (though risky) without high-level characters, if one has an adequate guard of men at arms; spell-casters with scrolls are also very desirable.

Cities might to some extent be "leveled" economically, as high-level NPCs would have acquired more treasure.

The transition to a different (more strategic) style of play at high levels also seems clearly implied. One can see the earlier expeditions as building up resources for the move to building and governing one's own stronghold.

That fits with the level-advancement scheme to establish a "rise to power" theme that implies some things about the setting. The suggestion that PCs will be carving out new holdings again fits with the concept of a waning Dark Age.

The pursuits of Lords, Wizards and Patriarchs do tend to call for more ad hoc adjudication. One of my other favorite games, King Arthur Pendragon, pays great attention to such matters. The "feel," though, is different from D&D.

I think a key is that by the time PCs reach Name level, the campaign ought to have developed "organically" a certain understanding among the participants. The characters' personalities and biographies will have been fleshed out probably even beyond what's written down, and likewise the geography and history of the setting.

There is thus a big difference between the situation when PCs have risen from first (or even fourth) level and one in which they were started in a high station. In the latter case, a wider scope of hard-and-fast mechanisms may be dearly wanted.

I have sometimes experimented with ditching such scores as Intelligence and Charisma, leaving all such considerations to how a character is played. Even retaining such stats, a referee must always consider circumstances. That's analogous to the kinds of rulings high-level play often demands.

If one wishes to retain the "wandering adventurer" mode, then having players choose between keeping treasure or getting XP for it works admirably. That may match more the "episodic" style of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser than the "saga" of Conan. There might be a transition, as GP become more valuable than XP.