The genius of the writing in 1e is that it mirrors the writing in bad fantasy fiction.  It's genre emulation pure and simple.  Gary gets out there and tells fourteen year old geeks that they're smart and imaginative and then gives them a book that scratches that corner of their ego.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;830374I am not trying to defend the dungeon as the one true way. If you like adventuring in the city and don't like dungeons, that is cool (I am generally more inclined toward intrigue and investigations than dungeons myself). But what new GMs need is guidance on how to prepare, structure adventures, etc. I don't feel the 2E DMG succeeded in supplying any starting structure to help the new GM. This wouldn't have had to have been a repeat of the 1E DMG. It could have just been an overview of the different adventure structures and styles at the time, with some advice on realizing them. All I am saying is you can read through the 2E DMG and not find any information on the nuts and bolts of world building, adventure design, etc. That is a big shortcoming in my view. I won't deny it has some really great tools in it. It isn't a bad book. I just think the DMG for dungeons and dragons needs to have some basic information so new GMs know what their options are (and while dungeons are not for everyone, I think given the game's association with them, expecting some basic info on dungeon building is reasonable).

Couldn't have said it better myself!

Quote from: Matt;830467DMG at best is a on inspirational mess of poorly edited stream of consciousness with the occasional $40 word thrown in as Gygax tries to make himself sound intellectual while discussing elves and hobbits.

"Inspirational"

What's more important for an RPG book than that?

How much of early RPGs realized the kinds of nuts and bolts about adventure structures that we do today though? It seems to me that Gygax was running with what worked, and didn't explicitly understand that a dungeon was a way to structure an adventure that was very easy for a new DM to understand.
And when 2e came around, the writers didn't realize that importance.

At the time of 2e I think there was already a widespread, explicit rejection of dungeons as being "hack and slash", but the only widespread idea that people had to replace them was the railroaded adventure. This in spite of the fact that what we would call sandbox tools were already available. I can't explain that other than to suggest it may have been related to the marketing of "modules", which were rarely substantial enough to support a sandbox. You need more of a regional focus for that. (I don't know how the settings for 2e were presented in relation to the modules.)

From reading this thread, since I was way outside the D&D mainstream at the time, I wonder if the lack of adventure prep and campaign management advice was in any way related to a belief that groups should or would be dependent on published adventures.

Quote from: Brad;830477"Inspirational"

What's more important for an RPG book than that?

Coherence

Quote from: Matt;830496Coherence

Although unintentional, I find the sections of the DMG that needed better editing (like initiative) to be feature, not bug.  Since every DM immediately had to make their first command decision about how to handle that, everyone immediately become accustomed to making command decisions.  And no group handled things exactly the same.  Again, feature, not bug.  

I love "what exactly is the DMG saying here, and what was EGG's intent?" discussions as much as the next guy - participate in them all the time.  But that's a related activity to RPG playing, not integral to playing RPGs.

I know that so many people still in the RPG hobby are drawn to the idea of crisp uniformity, where all the players know exactly how things will be handled because the game is written like a programming manual, and in theory the basic guts of the game are the same everywhere.  

Let them have it.  I want my 1E DMG that inspires me to sit down and do the prep for the sandbox campaign.  The programming manual simply fails in that regard, for me.

And the 2E DMG neither inspired me to create my own work, nor produced a crisp game.  It really was the laodicean edition.  Although TSR did pump out a lot of product so that people wouldn't have to create their own work.  So, I guess it was true to itself in that regard.

Quote from: Arminius;830494At the time of 2e I think there was already a widespread, explicit rejection of dungeons as being "hack and slash", but the only widespread idea that people had to replace them was the railroaded adventure. This in spite of the fact that what we would call sandbox tools were already available. I can't explain that other than to suggest it may have been related to the marketing of "modules", which were rarely substantial enough to support a sandbox. You need more of a regional focus for that. (I don't know how the settings for 2e were presented in relation to the modules.)

From reading this thread, since I was way outside the D&D mainstream at the time, I wonder if the lack of adventure prep and campaign management advice was in any way related to a belief that groups should or would be dependent on published adventures.

I can only speak for my gaming group but I didn't encounter any kind of hostility to the dungeon itself. What I encountered were a bunch of different people (myself included) basically trained under very different GMs, who then went about cobbling our own style together based on what our respective preferred lines were (so I was really into ravenloft and that affected a lot of how I ran games, but another friend of mine used a combo of 1E and 2E books--not out of preference but because those are simply what he had at the time) and was much more into running exploration type games. I didn't really get a sense of judgment in our group until after white wolf got huge and a lot of the TSR material seemed to change tone (though it is possible I am misremembering).

Modules did end up being an important tool for us. I basically modeled by first few campaigns on Feast of Goblyns and other modules like that.

Quote from: Matt;830496Coherence

Do you mean coherence in the GNS sense or just in the sense of wanting it to be clearly organized?

Quote from: EOTB;830506Although unintentional, I find the sections of the DMG that needed better editing (like initiative) to be feature, not bug.  Since every DM immediately had to make their first command decision about how to handle that, everyone immediately become accustomed to making command decisions.  And no group handled things exactly the same.  Again, feature, not bug.  

I love "what exactly is the DMG saying here, and what was EGG's intent?" discussions as much as the next guy - participate in them all the time.  But that's a related activity to RPG playing, not integral to playing RPGs.

I know that so many people still in the RPG hobby are drawn to the idea of crisp uniformity, where all the players know exactly how things will be handled because the game is written like a programming manual, and in theory the basic guts of the game are the same everywhere.  

Let them have it.  I want my 1E DMG that inspires me to sit down and do the prep for the sandbox campaign.  The programming manual simply fails in that regard, for me.

And the 2E DMG neither inspired me to create my own work, nor produced a crisp game.  It really was the laodicean edition.  Although TSR did pump out a lot of product so that people wouldn't have to create their own work.  So, I guess it was true to itself in that regard.

That's what I said up the thread re: interpretation of Gygax.

Quote from: bedrockbrendan;830509do you mean coherence in the gns sense or just in the sense of wanting it to be clearly organized?

gns = wtf?

Quote from: Matt;830533gns = wtf?

This: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNS_Theory

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;830539This: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNS_Theory

Yeah, that's overthinking sitting around with your friends and rolling dice and laughing about unforeseen consequences.

Quote from: Arminius;830494At the time of 2e I think there was already a widespread, explicit rejection of dungeons as being "hack and slash", but the only widespread idea that people had to replace them was the railroaded adventure. This in spite of the fact that what we would call sandbox tools were already available. I can't explain that other than to suggest it may have been related to the marketing of "modules", which were rarely substantial enough to support a sandbox. You need more of a regional focus for that. (I don't know how the settings for 2e were presented in relation to the modules.)

From reading this thread, since I was way outside the D&D mainstream at the time, I wonder if the lack of adventure prep and campaign management advice was in any way related to a belief that groups should or would be dependent on published adventures.

We rarely if ever ran published adventures, a few from White Dwarf perhaps, we just imagined ourselves as the characters we had created and in that context spending all the time in a dungeon felt unrealistic. We were self taught no guiding DM to show us how it was done so we drew inspiration from the knights of the round table, Wizard of Earthsea, Robin Hood, Conan, Fafhard and the Grey Mouser etc etc very few dungeons in those settings so dungeons quickly became an occasional sojourn and logically from a IC perspective a bloody dangerous idea. Why enter an unchartered dungeon with no obvious means of exit in search of hypothetical gold when the city is full of rich merchants? If you are goodly and just why spend your time searching for treasure and personal gain when you can improve the world and make things better by fighting the obvious enemies that are oppressing folks rather than the imagined ones that might lurk in dark places under the earth?

This was long before 2e came out and I feel that the shift in focus from Wargame to Roleplaying game which was D&Ds magical touch made that this type of evolution of the game inevitable.

Yes, groups did get out of the dungeon on their own, and both mechanics and GMing advice for what we'd call now call sandbox-style play were present from the start.

I think, though, that dungeons predominated in the early days of actual play, because they were easy to for individual DMs to create and manage. In the meantime, published adventures became a fixture. By the time people tired of dungeons, the campaign sandbox had been forgotten and so the reaction was more modules, instead of a presentation of methods of campaign development & management.

I may be right or wrong about that but I'm talking about the practices of writers and publishers, in relation to what people have said re: the 2e DMG. I'm not talking about particular groups, least of all those which started well before 2e.