Spying

This subject is covered on pp. 18-19 of the original Dungeon Masters Guide, an absurd amount of space to cover a subject which NO player I have encountered has ever been interested in attempting.  There are no modules written in which the players are intended to act as spies.  The argument made in the section is that most spies will be assassins, clearly indicating a solid belief on the writer's part that there ought to be a section in the DMG related to James Bond ... since no spy, ever, in the history of mankind, has ever been associated with professional assassination until Ian Fleming.  Spies are not killers, they are hotel keepers, servers, drivers, cleaners and other ordinary people who happen to see things and then tell others.  Spying is about passing information, not killing people ... and in the Medieval fantasy age, no one "infiltrates" a professional organization in order to obtain information that will be of use to a state or another professional organization.  In a fantasy setting, in a Middle Ages setting, even in a Renaissance setting, the idea is ridiculous, woefully inaccurate and indicative of someone scratching out the word "secret agent" and writing in the word "assassin" ... and then making that character a class without as many skills as a thief, then somehow justifying that character by the argument the character can also "spy."  The whole section is a baffling tautology and utterly useless to D&D.

Throwing the section out ...

Scouting concerns an enormously important skillset that predates language.  Literally, language was specifically invented to enable better scouting.  That's not a simplification.  That's the hard fact.

There are no scouting rules in the DMG.

Scouting consists of searching an area for the location of food and water, gathering information about the movements and presence of targets, organizing a party to successfully hunt those targets that are fast-moving and dangerous, collecting food for sustaining the party and a base population and managing communication between the scouting party and groups dependent on the scouters.  This would seem really, really important for D&D, so let me say it again:

There are no scouting rules in the DMG.

If there is an in-game logic to players heading out into a border region or wilderness to destroy an evil and clear out a dungeon, it's that this is a preliminary necessity to settling an area.  Humans — and we should assume any other humanoid race that expects to live 500+ years in a world with humans in it — are terrifically good at procreating.  It is the most successful thing that even stupid humans can do.  History has been largely about finding places for extra humans to live ... and so it stands to reason that if its a place where goblins can live, or chimera can live, there's probably water there, as well as food, wood, grass and other things that humans can make use of.  This should mean that if a bunch of these other things get eradicated from a region, we should expect a bunch of extra humans to flood into a space in order to live there.  And with that, it also stands to reason that there should be elements in the population ready to pay parties to waste things, with crowds of ready humans on stand-by as soon as these things are wasted.

Scouting is good for this kind of thing.  A group of settlers have already tried to settle a region, but they were all butchered by goblins and eaten by chimera, so now it's up to the party to find out where the goblins and chimera came from ... rooting them out and making places safe for the good people.

Granted, this part of our history is a little uncomfortable for our modern sensibilities.  There are few pictures more egregious today than this 1876 painting, American Progress by John Gast, who was Prussian-born and lived most of his life in Brooklyn:

Yet the dissonance exists plainly in players who do not hesitate to enter dungeons and slaughter all the goblins that they find, with even less judgement or consideration for their pillaging than is depicted above.  Moreover, we can condemn that "American" spirit today, but it is no different than the spirit that wiped out the Picts, the Rhaetians, the Avars and the Nabataneans, along with hundreds of other tribes and peoples, worldwide, in the thousands of years before Europeans conquered America.  That process is ongoing, as scores of small racial tribes everywhere in the world, from the Basque to the Timorese to the tribes in Lesotho, fight to hang onto the tiny pieces of ground they have left.  I don't condone it; but I won't ignore it either, and I'm no more willing to remove the sentiment of conquest over goblins from a D&D game than I am to remove war from RISK or Axis and Allies.  War is a bad thing.  This doesn't stop me from starting one in a video game.

Settlement makes sense from a D&D perspective.  Maybe it doesn't turn up so much in the tales of Arthur and Lancelot, but people finding a new land and fighting for it is all over the mythological tales of most cultures.  For example, the Bible, the book in every white character's pocket in the picture above.

There are no rules about settlement, or determining the number of people wanting to settle, or about the time needed to establish a colony or support it, in the DMG.

I will continue to say this: the fellows who wrote the original books were plowing a field that had never been plowed; they were planting seeds in ground that was so rich, those seeds couldn't help sprouting fruit.  But that doesn't make these guys geniuses.  They lifted ideas and context out of ordinary library books, turning them into rules, that did not work for the most part, and they made some spectacularly glaring omissions.  And part of the problem of 2e and later editions is that they spent all their time rewriting the old rules, or expanding the old rules, while continuing to ignore elements and facets of play purely because they weren't included in the original version.  One of the problems with reinventing the wheel over and over and over again is that if you don't put down the old wheel and start from scratch, you just reinvent the same old mistakes.

The stuff that made the old game tiresome merely becomes the stuff that makes the new game tiresome.