Go wild?

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Makes sense. My initial gaming experience was the club at college, all weekend, every weekend, plus a couple of weeknights. There was time for plenty of complexity there.

I'll also echo Nymdok's point that a lot of people, at least in the earlier days of gaming, started as kids. I'm talking high school or younger. Not exactly a hotbed of long-term thinking.

[Rasputin]

Originally Posted by johndallman

OK, this puzzles me. Consequences and repercussions from a broader society have always been a significant part of roleplaying in all the groups I've belonged to. Down a dungeon, they may be rarer than in town, but they can still happen. Sometimes an NPC in town has followers, prisoners or other interests in the dungeon.

I didn't say this can't be so. Heck, my own games tend to be gritty with loads of NPC interaction and mundane problems sharing the stage with monsters and magic. And I'm running Dungeon Fantasy! But for pitching ready-to-play stuff, folks go for shooting up stuff. It's not that there can't be the goblin baby problem, but that you can't assume it out of the box.

[Rasputin]

Originally Posted by Nymdok

When we played AD&D as kids, we didnt worry if the Goblins had a full warren back at home.
We didnt worry if that was the last dragon we were wailing on.
Bad Guys needed to have Bad Things happen to them and we were those things. That was it.

Yes, this is at what I was getting with my comment. Mind you, even in high school I was often playing characters that didn't go for this at all, or ones that reveled in their amorality, but I knew darn well that I was unusual in my group. Even now, I see this happening in games. I was in a Labyrinth Lord game a few years back where the GM made orcs and goblins bubble up from pods in the dungeon so we could just blast them without mercy.