Great Article: The Deadliest Page

Check this one out:

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-deadliest-page.html

This one is great fun, and it reflects the tendency of old-school RPGs being more a collection of 'cool ideas' often pulled from places like the old Dragon Magazine than things actually designed to work well within the game. AD&D was like this, along with other TSR games such as Top Secret and others, where deadly parrots and laser-armed security cameras could stand guard over a megalomaniac's dungeon-like lair.

There were a lot of cool ideas in those games, random pieces of this and that thrown in, and if you played them by the 100% by the rules you would sit there and say, "WTF is going on?"

It is the curse of unintended consequences, and this sort of stuff is common in sandbox RPGs all the time, especially if you mod games like Skyrim with all sorts of random encounter mods, road patrols, story events, and bandit camps - all of a sudden you stumble out of a dungeon and there is a full-on war going on between bandits and vampires and you never knew that could happen, but you love it and go with the flow as you run for your life and spells are flying around you.

Some games are less sandbox and more story focused, such as Pathfinder's adventure paths or to a different extent, D&D 5's adventure hardcovers. I like to play both of these games as sandbox games honestly, and just use the pieces they give me by the rules and create an interconnected, compelling world out of them, warts, strange rules, and unintended consequences be damned. If mages can do this or gunslingers that, players should not be surprised to see NPCs in the world doing the same thing. If monsters are X% likely to appear, then they will appear at that rate around the players or not, and the kingdoms of the world will just have to deal.

The gods made these rules and I believe the world should abide by them, otherwise, how can you say you are truly playing the game? I know, some like to sculpt a masterful narrative and novel-like experience using the rules, and that is totally cool, but I love my sandbox games so much I tend to run them even if they trash my story and ruin a module writer's carefully crafted plot-line and scenes.

Check the article out, it is a funny one that highlights some of the strange and quirky things I love about old-school gaming.