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Originally Posted by Anthony
Or you just assume that there aren't really distinct encounters. For example, if you look at the original Caves of Chaos, each of the mini-areas goes into a bunch of detail about how the inhabitants alert and reinforce, so if you don't make special efforts to prevent it, the entire cave, and possibly some allied factions, will cascade on your head.
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I grabbed a digital copy of the original Keep on the Borderlands (later retitled Caves of Chaos), and it looks like it actually sets up many (thiugh not all) of the monsters to be enemies of each other, which I think would reduce the amount of ganging up they can do.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony
In general my preference for combat heavy games is the 'monster of the week' setup: one set-piece fight per session, and the RPing is mostly 'find the fight'. This usually works better for PCs in a reactionary role (a monster is eating peasants. Heroes, go out and slay it!), though you can also make it work by asking at the end of each session 'what do you want to do next session' and then the GM has until the next session to set up the breadcrumbs to get them to the fight.
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I've done this, and there's a lot to be said for it from a plausibility point of view, but it leads to a slower pace of play for dungeon crawls (and wilderness adventures with frequent "wandering monster" encounters). This is not a criticism of the style, but it's less satisfying if your players want to spend more time fighting and less time looking for the fight.