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From: Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Subject: Re: What difficultly level do you play one?
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 2024 11:43:46 -0400
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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.



>
>For Tomb of Horrors my understanding is that it was a Gygax 'special' 
>designed for tournament play and to really tax the players brains.
>