Moving Silently, Checking For Traps

I never really played high level campaigns as a kid. I only imagined what it would be like. My assumptions of it were that PCs would reach a certain level, then build a castle in the wilderness. The campaign would then be driven by "clearing the hex," and dealing with emptying local monster lairs to make their claimed territory more inhabitable. Monsters would eventually move back in, harass the locals that moved in to support and be supported by the castle, and some dungeons would have to be cleared again. I also expected there would be warfare. PCs would raise armies and battle with other armies. I imagined that neighbors would have various reasons to clash with the PCs. Maybe they were evil knights, or orcs. These battles would take place using some kind of wargame rules that were compatible with D&D. Maybe it was Battlesystem. Other armies suggest other powers in the region. So I also assumed there would be politics. Much of the roleplay would center around meetings w...

 In 1987, "Moving Silently, Checking For Traps" was our mantra as we played Dungeons & Dragons. We uttered those words so much, it was abbreviated as "MSCFT". It was how we proceeded through each other's dungeons. We felt that if we didn't specifically announce that we were doing so, the DM would assume we were not. Eventually, we decided that it would be best to assume the opposite: Whenever we were exploring a dungeon, MSCFT was a given, and the DM would just call for the appropriate rolls at the appropriate times. We didn't have the Internet back then. The best source we had for meta analysis of play were the articles in our incomplete Dragon Magazine collection. We had to figure this stuff out on our own. I remember earlier, in 1986, the fist guy in our class to show up with a D&D module had told me: "My older brother didn't know if he was allowed to do this thing in the game, so he wrote a letter to the author, and the author wrote ...