>Running 2e
>reviewing race options
Why does old dnd focus so much on the ability of creatures to detect sloped ground so much? When does this come up? How do you use this as a DM?
Why would a player be looking for slopes? Is this referring to a long passage saying it eventually goes deeper underground or to the surface? Otherwise, wouldn't dropping a ball bearing get level just as effectively?
Who exactly is manufacturing ball bearings in most 2e settings? And why are they widely available to the point murderhobos have them?
Ah, didn't notice that those weren't shop items in this edition.
but still like wtf, I know I must be overlooking something obvious.
That seems to be a quirk of AD&D, which is bizarrely crunchy for an OSR game in ways you wouldn't expect it to be.
See, back in the day AD&D 1E was really more of a simplified tool kit that everyone hacked into what they want. 2e was seen as a compilation of all the house rules that were seen as "necessary" by the community and the devs, and so included a lot of the these obscure rules in them.
Then you had the same sort of thing happening all over again for 3.0, which resulted in the fixes that made 3.5, and so on.
Meanwhile the truly enlightened among us were playing Basic, it's revisions, and now it's Retroclones.
It's useful for detecting certain kinds of traps and misleading passageways.
If you are actually worried about standing on a fucking slope unbeknownst to you, a hardened loam ball is going to do the same job at 100% accuracy instead of the hot 37.5% the Halfling gets. And it's probably significantly cheaper to maintain than a Halfling and less annoying to boot.
>Why would a player be looking for slopes? Is this referring to a long passage saying it eventually goes deeper underground or to the surface?
Yes. You don't want to accidentally move deeper when you're trying to move toward the surface to escape.
I think the idea is that a gently sloped passage could have you move to a different floor of the dungeon without being told by the DM, causing great confusion and frustration for the player hand-drawing a map of the dungeon by the DM's description as they realize the rooms are overlapping somehow.
Wasn't there one dungeon trap with a slope that was gradual enough that by the time you noticed it, it was too late?
Yeah, but can it suck your dick without kneeling.
That's not how our sense of balance works. Unless magic or something.
Seem like the best answers for me.
The problem is the actively looking part, this doesn't prevent initial frustration. You'd have to realize that something is fucky, then go back and look to see if you sloped. Saves time in the future, but you need the trial and error initially.
>ad&d in a nutshell
Put a hole in the ball
>step one...
Nobody in this thread has ever actually been in a big cave. It's very possible for a passage to have a 1:100 or 1:500 slope and a very slight curve that ends up putting you a couple miles away from where you thought you were.
For adventurers in a fantasy setting, knowing if you're gradually spiraling up or down would be extremely important.
>ball bearing
Only works if it's smooth flooring.
You guys are leaving out the most important part: wandering monster tables used to be organized by floor. The deeper levels had harder monsters. And a natural cave might not look like it's sloping down if the footing is rough enough (good luck with using any sort of ball)
Why do the tougher wandering monsters avoid going up the gently sloping tunnel to the next floor?
They could, but they might be ceding their territory to their rivals on their own floor and below.
Because 1e was gamist, not simulationist.
Unless it's steep a natural stone surface is seldom conducive to rolling balls beacause of bumps and dips. Small steel balls such as found inside ball bearings don't roll well on dirt, too heavy, too small a radius, so if dirt's present you've got even less hope with the ball.
It doesn't fucking matter. The tunnel leads where the DM says it leads. Whether it goes in 360 degree loops or travels through 5th dimensional space, doesn't matter.
This kind of pedantic dickery is typical of Gygaxian "Lets see if you people have enough knowledge of truly trivial bullshit to make me feel satisfied in your attempts to get to the fun I have buried behind some 10x10 rooms"
The tunnel leads where the map says it leads. The distinction is important, because players can figure out the map and nail it down concretely so that it's a known thing they can deal with.
And the reason for all the mapping originally was that one of Gygax's original players during development loved mapping. Gygax was very much in favor of making D&D a fun game, but not everybody has fun in the same way.
Much of the "pedantic bullshit" in AD&D came about as an attempt to rein in increasingly bullshit players both in his own playtest groups and in the community at large
>The tunnel leads where the map says it leads
Thank god we get together every fucking Friday in my basement so we can all hail the fucking map. Which apparently is so bad and so important that we have to try and roll dice to figure out if there's a fucking floor slope because we're fucking subterranean draftsmen.
Well if you'd rather just play make believe, go right ahead. Some of us like the original style of gameplay, it's tense and dangerous and exciting.
SO TENSE, SO DANGEROUS, SO EXCITING
FIND OUT NEXT TIME, TO SEE IF THE FLOOR IS FUCKING SLOPED
becuase they can sense the slope and fear the mimic slopes.
Being a huge faggot isn't helping to put your argument across.
I don’t think you can call them slopes anymore, user....