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From: JAB <noway@nochance.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Subject: Re: What difficultly level do you play one?
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 2024 09:45:12 +0100
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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.

There really is almost nothing in the official written material that 
pushed forward that's how the game was supposed to be played.

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