A new blog post from yesterday for 'Gygax Day' (which was Friday). A compilation of actual play reports from Gygax himself, and it is an old school dungeon crawl.
Originally shared by Zenopus Archives
For Gygax's 80th birthday anniversary, I've collected his 2002 play-test reports for the "Dungeon Delving" portion of the module the Hall of Many Panes, originally posted to his gygax-games mailing. These are still publicly available in a yahoo groups archive, but are hard to find and cumbersome to read in that format.
http://zenopusarchives.blogspot.com/2018/07/gygax-dungeon-delving-playtest.html
http://zenopusarchives.blogspot.com/2018/07/gygax-dungeon-delving-playtest.html
Cool, thanks for posting! Pretty interesting to see EGG's much later take on a dungeon similar to his 1970s style designs, as well as accompanying play reports. Had never heard of these existing, great find!
ReplyDeleteThat was some good reading! Thanks :)
ReplyDeleteHad some time to read through it.. allowing for it being run with the LA system rather than OD&D or AD&D, the play report is a fascinating tour of Gygaxian design. A lot of mapping (and exploration in order to map), a lot of traps, and some NPC interaction. The persistent theme of sympathy for the dead monsters was unexpected in the writing; I was also surprised that only one encounter was almost lethal, and there were no fatalities - in fact, most encounters seemed to be of the "ginding" variety one finds in MMORPGs (where you need to "grind" through a bunch of monster encounters to get an item or materials to craft an item). The mazelike design of the level itself seems purposely designed specifically to spur a lot of wandering around by a party (as well as making the level more difficult to map).
ReplyDeleteThis being a Holmes group, it's interesting to contrast this level design with the Zenopus dungeon and the one from Holmes' RPG book; Holmes seems much less interested in mazelike designs than Gygax was.
I imagine Gygax's players were better mappers.
ReplyDeleteThey had to be better mappers in order to not get lost &/or survive. Modern players (mine anyway) hate mapping.
ReplyDeleteI'm running my modern players through Goodman Games' "Into the Borderlands" - specifically Quasqueton, and I'm only giving them verbal directions. If they don't start mapping, they're gonna get lost!
Is getting lost fun? I have only been lost in reality, and I didn't enjoy it.
ReplyDeleteChris Holmes Not from the players' perspective, that's for sure!
ReplyDeleteI guess I should clarify: my modern players (not a single one of them played any older edition where tracking logistics was part & parcel of the game) refuse to create maps, and rely solely on the DM for their maps so they know where they are. Yes, we use a battlemat for encounters & combat, and no - mapping is not the only thing they don't keep track of.
These are all habits I want them to get into so the DM (me) is not so heavily encumbered. ;)