he who thinks. The sky is the virtual limit!
Most players ask for a description of the
item first and go from there: “Sounds like
a phylactery to me, Fred, let’s see...
there’s one of Faithfulness, one of Long
Years, and one for Monster Attraction.”
They then proceed to test the available
choices and continue on to destroy more
monsters and gain more treasure.
This time I threw a Phylactery of Fumbling at them, which they eventually decided was supposed to give the cleric a
long life, and the next monster they ran
into was a vampire. The faithful cleric
dove into the fray with his trusty Mace of
Disruption — and promptly dropped it!
Before he could pick it up, the vampire
hit him twice for a loss of 4 levels. Such fun!
The books themselves are not necessarily
the final word on every question.
There are statements in all of them to the
effect that they are meant as guides only.
To quote from the Afterword to the
DMG:
"It is the spirit of the game, not the
letter of the rules, which is important.
Never hold to the letter written, nor allow
some barracks room lawyer to force
quotations from the rule book upon you ,
if it goes against the obvious intent of the
game.... You are creator and final arbiter.
By ordering things as they should be, the
game as a whole first, your campaign
next, and your participants thereafter,
you will be playing ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS as it was meant to
be. ”
That statement says it all. To me, it is
the most important statement in the entire
DMG. If you are going to stick blindly
to the books, use the charts in them exclusively,
and never create something of
your own, kyou may as well play a board
game such as Monopoly or Scrabble.
Their rules are written out, are not too
complicated, and are basically inflexible.
An AD&D game is not inflexible
and was not meant to be. The books,
even though they define a complicated
structure of rules (which in many
particular cases must be adhered to strictly),
are in general very open-ended. Much of the
text of the rules is taken up with general
guidelines and lists of possibilities,
leaving a multitude of options up to the
DM.
.
Players might be upset after experiencing an unorthodox encounter. In the
long run, however, they will come to realize that the game is more fun this way.
They will not become so easily bored,
and will tend to pay more attention to
what is happening around them.
Your game must be challenging at all
times. If it is not, players will become
bored and may go looking elsewhere;
your campaign will die a slow (or perhaps not so slow) death. It should be a
personal Source of pride that your campaign is exciting, unique, and consistent
yet always changing.
This does not mean that you should
immediately drop everything and start
changing your game so that it is unrecognizable as an AD&D campaign. Think
carefully about anything you decide to
change. Will it make the game unnecessarily complicated? Will it unbalance the
game? These, and many others, are
questions that you must take into consideration before altering anything.
On the other hand, if you feel that your
game has gone too far to be revived,
there's nothing nothing to stop you from scrapping
it in favor of an entirely new campaign. Think
carefully about anything you decide to
change.Will it make the game unnecessarily
complicated? Will it unbalance the
game?These, and many others, are
questiosn that you must take into consideration
before altering anything.
The players should not read the DMG
or the Monster Manual .But if they do, all
is not lost for the DM who wants to keep
some of the secrets of his world to himself.
There are many things you can do to
rectify the situation, kand improve your
game at the same time.