This is a sincere question, but I don't care if it devolves into a petty quarrel.  Why do many "old school" players assume the sandbox style of play is the ideal "old school" method of play?  Growing up, based on the books at hand, the dungeon (i.e. adventure) seemed to be the focal point of the game.  Feel free to dash my assumptions, but do please cite your sources.

I was raised up in an unusual gaming environment; my introductions to RPGs (via older brothers) were Marvel Superheroes and D&D.  When I wanted to run my own D&D I had a patchwork collection from both AD&D 1st and 2nd editions.  The differences were lost on me during my youth and I integrated books from both runs.

Today, most self-proclaimed "old-schoolers" extol the virtues of vast sandboxes and player-driven play.  I've successfully run plenty of campaigns using that formula as well.  But why do we presume that this style of play was what the original D&D authors intended?  Reflecting back on patchwork collection of books I grew up with, I would assume that the dungeon and the stand-alone adventure was the "unit" of a campaign.

Put another way, why do we assume that D&D should be played sandbox style and not adventure-driven, especially in light of publication history (e.g. Isle of Dread was not written until '81)?

Educate me.

The original white/brown box described dungeons but also wilderness adventures on a hexmap, with the strong implication that the latter was the fully-elaborated campaign context.

No where, absolutely nowhere in the original game will you find plot-based, scene-ified, story-type scenarios.

Get your hands on the original game text, or the AD&D 1e DMG. That's all the evidence you need.

Although, I must highlight, the term "sandbox" is a dirty word nowadays. It´s the signpost of a latecomer or bandwagon swine. Also, eerily, the sub-complex swine have perverted it into a tool of LIMITATION, which still puzzles me.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;382801The original white/brown box described dungeons but also wilderness adventures on a hexmap, with the strong implication that the latter was the fully-elaborated campaign context.

No where, absolutely nowhere in the original game will you find plot-based, scene-ified, story-type scenarios.

Get your hands on the original game text, or the AD&D 1e DMG. That's all the evidence you need.

Bold emphasis mine.

Right, I agree with you here.  I'm not implying that story was ever emphasized by the original designers.  If I made that mistake in the OP I made it in error.  But I do wonder if the dungeon/adventure was the primary unit of play vs. what we now recognize as sandbox/campaign as the primary unit of play.  

I do own the AD&D 1e DMG.  It was my first document used to run a game.  But I remain unconvinced that it supported sandbox-style play in the way we currently understand it.  Anyone is welcome to cite passages from it though, I don't have it on me and haven't used it for 10+ years.  I'm not saying those passages don't exist, but I don't have them available to me currently and invite discussion about "how the game was supposed to be played."

Quote from: Settembrini;382803Although, I must highlight, the term "sandbox" is a dirty word nowadays. It´s the signpost of a latecomer or bandwagon swine. Also, eerily, the sub-complex swine have perverted it into a tool of LIMITATION, which still puzzles me.

Is it?  I don't honestly know where I stand on the actual term, although I do have a suspicion that it only entered our vernacular by way of video games to describe how many of us have played D&D for a long time.  I don't find the word by itself offensive, nor do I find the way I normally run games a LIMITATION.

Quote from: winkingbishop;382807Is it?  I don't honestly know where I stand on the actual term, although I do have a suspicion that it only entered our vernacular by way of video games to describe how many of us have played D&D for a long time.  I don't find the word by itself offensive, nor do I find the way I normally run games a LIMITATION.

Several video games which I thought were like sandboxes:  "Grand Theft Auto 3" and "Grand Theft Auto:  Vice City".

Albeit doing stuff outside of the prescribed missions sequences in GTA, was kind of on the mundane to boring side.  Stuff like killing cops, blowing up cars, running over pedestrians, etc ... got pretty boring very quickly.

With that being said, I found sandbox D&D games somewhat more interesting with the right group of players, than a sandbox in Grand Theft Auto.

Quote from: ggroy;382809With that being said, I found sandbox D&D games somewhat more interesting with the right group of players, than a sandbox in Grand Theft Auto.

Yeah.  See, I'm not so sure the word "sandbox" as applied to video games is the same thing as applied to RPGs.  I wasn't really trying to open up that can of worms in the OP, but I suppose it is worth mentioning.  In my view of the D&D I grew up with, the sandbox has a closer relationship to "activating missions" than it does "running around killing cops, see what happens."  

That is not to suggest that total free-form interaction with the campaign can't create emergent fun.  It can, I've done it, and it requires a fairly experienced referee to satisfy the game table.  But I'm not convinced that was the original intent of the designers.  I still believe that the sandbox serves as the ether in which adventures or dungeons are placed in.

I think I've already admitted that I am not studied in reading between the lines of Gygax or Arenson, but I'll make that explicit here again.  What I'm really asking is was D&D meant to played as a game of dungeons and adventures or did the designers think one should play out every hex/meal/day/encounter as is extolled by (in varying degrees) modern players?

It's got everything to with 1/ Gaming history and 2/ Immersion, actuality of the game world and player choices.

1/ The fact that D&D derived from Chainmail, and that the game was thus conceived with a wargaming frame of mind, where you have a base situation, like two forces opposing each other on a battlefield, with the game itself being the pleasure of solving this situation, unfolding it, with a maximum of player input, with the rules enabling historically (at first) consistent choices rather than inhibiting them. Which leads to ...

2/ The fact that the game is about make-believe and actuality. In other words, the referee prepares an environment for the players to interact with, but choices and strategies on the PCs parts are entirely up to the players and should remain so. From there, the players can go wherever they want below and above the ground, do whatever they want with the environment, however they want to do it. The events of the game develop in real time, at the actual game table, and the players' input is more important under this set of expectations than ever.

It's worth to repeat that the notion of "story" as part of the game is really something anachronistic to the early game. What you're playing is actuality, make-believe events as they actually occur. There's no "story" anywhere. If "story" there is, that'll be later, when the game is over, and you tell other people what happened at the game table: the story of how the game unfolded.

Quote from: winkingbishop;382805I do own the AD&D 1e DMG.  It was my first document used to run a game.  But I remain unconvinced that it supported sandbox-style play in the way we currently understand it.  Anyone is welcome to cite passages from it though, I don't have it on me and haven't used it for 10+ years.

It very much does, as it pertains to the notion of underworld and campaign milieu. You should read it again, with fresh eyes, I agree.

Quote from: winkingbishop;382805Bold emphasis mine.

Right, I agree with you here.  I'm not implying that story was ever emphasized by the original designers.  If I made that mistake in the OP I made it in error.  But I do wonder if the dungeon/adventure was the primary unit of play vs. what we now recognize as sandbox/campaign as the primary unit of play.  

I do own the AD&D 1e DMG.  It was my first document used to run a game.  But I remain unconvinced that it supported sandbox-style play in the way we currently understand it.  Anyone is welcome to cite passages from it though, I don't have it on me and haven't used it for 10+ years.  I'm not saying those passages don't exist, but I don't have them available to me currently and invite discussion about "how the game was supposed to be played."

I appreciate the query.
As I have postulated before, the unit of play and the focus of the game grew in scope over the course of the first couple years of the game.  One of the many themes in the original/early maturation of the game dealt with a game for dungeons, to an adventure based game, to a sandbox based game.  

AS for the DMG1E, and 1E in general, it certainly supported Sandbox in a myriad of fashions.  From the establishment of a keep or power base later in a PC's career, to the tithe's for certain classes, to what sort of courtesan one might meet in a city, to the encounter charts for different types of terrain and the rules for getting lost outside, disease and sanity charts,  it took the game from the adventure to the campaign ideal.

If players aren't out there with their characters making choices and doing different things, what's the point?

If my group told me, "We're walking away from the Temple of Elemental Evil module" and went off to some other locale to adventure, I'd oblige them.

It's their world.  I simply arbitrate the mechanics that abstract events that occur in it.  Who am I to say a giant invisible hand (Bigby!) picks them up and drops them off back in front of the temple?  Or that an impenetrable fog surrounds where they're adventuring and they just somehow know it won't dissipate until they've done XYZ thing?

I mean, shit, if I was going to do silly contrived nonsense like that I might as well run the fuckin' Dragonlance novels.

Erm, modules.

Quote from: Benoist;382812It's worth to repeat that the notion of "story" as part of the game is really something anachronistic to the early game.

I don't think that's entirely true and there is plenty of evidence of people running stories as soon as role-playing spread to a wider audience.  Exhibit A is Bill Armintrout's article The Metamorphosis Alpha Notebook from The Space Gamer #42 from August 1981 describing his the game he ran in college when the game first came out (roughly 1977) in which the the techniques and examples he describe run the gamut from things based on verisimilitude to things based on story (see the "Ah, Dulcinea!" section) and include several examples of GM authority-sharing.  Exhibit B is Glenn Blacow's article Aspects of Adventure Gaming from Different Worlds #10 from October 1980 in which he talks about styles of play including, among other things, GM's telling stories.  Exhibit C is Traveller Adventure 3: Twilight's Peak, again from 1980, which contains the following text near the beginning of the book: "Mandatory rumors are essential to the adventure. As such, they must be provided to the adventurers without regard to chance or mischance."  Exhibit D, Traveller Double Adventure 2: Across the Bright Face, also from 1980, doesn't even give the player's a choice and starts the players off in medias res.

So I think there there is clear evidence going back to 1980 of people playing games that involved more than challenging player skill or letting the players wander freely through a predetermined setting, even well before 1980.  So unless your definition of the "early game" is limited to those run by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson or stops in 1975 or 1976, I think there is ample evidence that people running plenty of "early games", especially when they learned them from the rulebook, treated them as a sort of Rorschach test that they made their own in the process of trying to figure it out.

Please note that I like sandbox play quite a lot and it's my preferred type of game as a player.  My point is simply that a wide variety of play styles go back to the very early days of the hobby, too.

When I'm talking about the "early game", I'm not talking about Metamorphosis Alpha c. 1980 or whatnot.
I'm talking of the original D&D game c. 1973-74.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;382824If players aren't out there with their characters making choices and doing different things, what's the point?

If my group told me, "We're walking away from the Temple of Elemental Evil module" and went off to some other locale to adventure, I'd oblige them.

It's their world.  I simply arbitrate the mechanics that abstract events that occur in it.  Who am I to say a giant invisible hand (Bigby!) picks them up and drops them off back in front of the temple?  Or that an impenetrable fog surrounds where they're adventuring and they just somehow know it won't dissipate until they've done XYZ thing?

I mean, shit, if I was going to do silly contrived nonsense like that I might as well run the fuckin' Dragonlance novels.

Erm, modules.

See, I think I agree with you.  But what I'm driving at is just that scenario you presented: Players moving from one "adventure" to another.  Is OD&D designed to be a game of one adventure "Temple of E. Evil & My Goblin in my Pocket" or is it a game of living the lives of Tim the Wizard.  Is it about what Tim encounters in every hex of his life or is it hand-waving between Dungeons X & Y?

Quote from: winkingbishop;382832See, I think I agree with you.  But what I'm driving at is just that scenario you presented: Players moving from one "adventure" to another.  Is OD&D designed to be a game of one adventure "Temple of E. Evil & My Goblin in my Pocket" or is it a game of living the lives of Tim the Wizard.  Is it about what Tim encounters in every hex of his life or is it hand-waving between Dungeons X & Y?

I'm not sure I undertand the question. Fact is, the original game was thinking in terms of adventure sites and milieu. The adventure itself isn't what is on paper. It's what's happening at the game table while people are playing.