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From: Dimensional Traveler <dtravel@sonic.net>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Subject: Re: What difficultly level do you play one?
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 2024 09:02:43 -0700
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On 7/13/2024 8:43 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
> On Sat, 13 Jul 2024 09:45:12 +0100, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 11/07/2024 16:23, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
>>> On Thu, 11 Jul 2024 09:31:05 +0100, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 10/07/2024 12:22, Zaghadka wrote:
>>>>> On Wed, 10 Jul 2024 09:28:12 +0100, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action, JAB
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Another one of my pet peeves, monsters that just inhabit rooms waiting
>>>>>> to be killed by some passing adventurers. Do they never eat, sleep, work?
>>>>>
>>>>> Ah, the Gygax approach. Yeah, that's why 2e introduced this whole novel
>>>>> concept called "ecology." That and the idea that creatures - that should
>>>>> be mortal enemies - are just hanging out in one room, never leaving,
>>>>> while the other group they hate hangs out in another is silliness.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> That chimes with my experience of playing AD&D 'back in the day'. We
>>>> used to run pre-written modules mixed with homebrew ones and naturally
>>>> the 'formula' of the former was the basis for the latter. Get to
>>>> dungeon, kill everything and grab the loot. We even had a DM that
>>>> dispensed with all the faff of finding the dungeon and just placed you
>>>> at the entrance.
>>>
>>>
>>> In fairness, while the conceit of the dungeon-crawl was fairly basic
>>> in the day, even the early modules had the expectation of a more
>>> robust and reactive world. But the modules were rarely written with
>>> that intention stated outright, almost never giving out specific
>>> alternatives and details on what to do should the players stray from
>>> the expected path. It was left unsaid, and so many DMs -sticking to
>>> the text- played the game exactly as written, which led to a lot of
>>> very static dungeons where you COULD rest at will, with enemy NPCs
>>> (who were little more than hit-points and stat-blocks) that cheerfully
>>> remained cloistered in their assigned rooms until the players stumbled
>>> upon them.
>>>
>>> Worse, this behavior became self-reinforcing to a point where players
>>> played the game and then expected that's what D&D was about, and so
>>> created their own modules that were loot-heavy combat-focused
>>> dungeon-crawls. But I don't really see that as the intent of TSR and
>>> Gygax. It was just a result of the style of writing; of creating a
>>> fairly bland 'sand-box' setting that expected the DM and players to
>>> give it life without providing much in the way of assistance on how to
>>> do that.
>>>
>>> That D&D -and the hobby- was so new was partly to blame, of course. It
>>> wasn't really known what sort of assistance players would need in this
>>> area. Especially since -at the start- TSR couldn't even /imagine/
>>> adventure modules would be a thing; surely, they thought, everyone
>>> would just make their own adventures rather than buy a pre-build
>>> adventure!
>>>
>>> And TSR's own format hampered them as well; early modules were quite
>>> short in page count (24pp) but expansive in territory. They often
>>> included multiple cities and dungeons, and there was only so much
>>> detail and advice they could squeeze into every booklet. Later
>>> adventures became smaller in scope, longer in page count, and a lot of
>>> this extra space was generally used to enliven the settings beyond
>>> just listing the inhabitants and contents of each room... because the
>>> authors learned that players /needed/ that extra detail if they were
>>> going to do anything beyond a brain-dead dungeon-crawl.
>>>
>>> (In fact, I've read that the world's most famous dungeon crawl module,
>>> "Tomb of Horrors", was written as a take-down of this sort of
>>> gameplay. 'So this is the sort of dungeon crawl you want? Well, here,
>>> delve into this and watch your characters suffer and die.' I guess the
>>> hope was players would bash their heads against the ruthless
>>> difficulty of Acererak's dungeon and learn to play smarter ;-)
>>>
>>> The TL;DR is that while a lot of D&D modules come across as fairly
>>> uninspired dungeon-crawls (and undeniably that is how most of them
>>> actually /were/ played), I don't get the impression that's how the
>>> writers EXPECTED them to be played.
>>>
>>
>> Is that's really what they thought I haven't seen any real evidence of
>> it and they did an awful job of saying that's how the game was supposed
>> to be played which is what I would have expected at least somewhere.
> 
> I don't disagree with that. ;-)
> 
>> There really is almost nothing in the official written material that
>> pushed forward that's how the game was supposed to be played.
> 
> A few hints are scatted in the official rulebooks that the world
> should be reactive (DMG 1E p104, for instance) but I agree, actual
> recommendations on the matter were fairly scarce. Then again, actual
> advice on how to play the game /in general/ wasn't that common either;
> almost the entire focus of those original rulebooks was on
> dice-rolling rather than the more ephermeral roleplaying. Still, There
> was a lot of stuff written in The Dragon Magazine with suggestions
> along these lines, although how 'official' you may consider that is up
> to debate. But if you read on how Gygax played his own campaigns, you
> do see that he didn't run adventures where everything was static and
> dependent on player actions.
> 
> That lack of clear language was a result of a blindness on the part of
> Gygax and TSR; a failure to see that such obvious (to them)
> instruction was required. They slowly started adding in clearer
> instructions piecemeal, scattered across various books (the
> Dungeoneers / Wilderness Survival Guides, Dungeon Masters Design Kit,
> and with examples with later 1st Ed adventure modules and campaign
> settings where there was more focus on how NPCs and monsters would
> react to player actions. But it wasn't until 2nd Edition that TSR
> would formalize the idea, in books like DMGR1 Campaign & Catacomb
> Guide and DMGR5 Creative Campaigning, which were purposefully written
> to aid DMs in creating more robust campaigns and pulling the game out
> of the dungeon-crawl.
> 
Something that I think is worth remembering is that D&D was at its very 
beginning based on a small rule book for a table-top miniatures wargame, 
'Chainmail'.

-- 
I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky 
dirty old man.