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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: Sun, 14 Jul 2024 10:15:18 +0100
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On 13/07/2024 16:43, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
>> 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.
> 

That's the problem I have, if that really was what they thought then 
you'd think when they introduced the game someone would have said, this 
style of gameplay is going to be entirely alien to many people so we 
need to provide guidance on how to get the most out of it. That's 
especially true when you consider how many players are only going to get 
the information from TSR products. So you mention Dragon magazine, that 
was available in the UK (I bought a few copies) but only in specialised 
stores. The one you could get in the local newsagents was White Dwarf 
and that had already moved to being focused on GW products.

Saying that we did get more into the roleplaying side when we started 
WHFRP. That wasn't really anything to do with official guidance but 
instead the pre-written modules leaned that way. When we started it was 
more a case of with fancy a change of system.