I think in theory it was another example of "planning for a campaign, not a session": that you got a big leg up if you prepped right, so the dungeon was hard the first time when you didn't know to expect frost creatures, and a lot easier when you took the effort to load up on them in advance.
I'm not sure I have ever run a dungeon that was not either a) in a setting that would give a reasonable amount of contextual clues from the beginning ("You've been hired to get rid of the frost giants who live up on this snowy mountain" striking me as a reasonable hint that fire spells will likely be more use than ice ones) or b) allowed the capacity for going in and scouting it out enough to learn that sort of thing and then going home again to equip appropriately. (Not that a sufficiently timid or gung-ho group of characters can't scupper such planning entirely.)
I do like those different kinds of casting as a paradigm, though my mind tends to drift towards specialists in each particular modality as interestingly different to play.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-26 12:51 am (UTC)I'm not sure I have ever run a dungeon that was not either a) in a setting that would give a reasonable amount of contextual clues from the beginning ("You've been hired to get rid of the frost giants who live up on this snowy mountain" striking me as a reasonable hint that fire spells will likely be more use than ice ones) or b) allowed the capacity for going in and scouting it out enough to learn that sort of thing and then going home again to equip appropriately. (Not that a sufficiently timid or gung-ho group of characters can't scupper such planning entirely.)
I do like those different kinds of casting as a paradigm, though my mind tends to drift towards specialists in each particular modality as interestingly different to play.