Quote from: Benoist;382834I'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.

I think you got what I was asking.  Is the original game more about going from adventure to adventure or is it about living day-to-day as your character?

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?

Well, consider this:

All of the really fun and sometimes cryptic "stuff" in AD&D was all there because Gary's group put it there as they played OD&D.  Chariot of (Dennis) Sustare.  The Tzoonk (Rob Kuntz) Fragment.  Hell, the way Meteor Swarm is written in the Greyhawk rulebook for OD&D is an in joke between Gary, Rob Kuntz and Jim Ward.

All that stuff came about - kingdom names in Greyhawk, spell names, dungeons (and the lands those dungeons were located in!) because of campaign verisimilitude (there's that word a second time today!) on the part of Gary (and Rob and Al and Jim etc. etc.).  It is what made and makes D&D great.  

I'm not going to tell you that not having a highly textured campaign is "wrong" or anything, but I really think people are missing out on the fun when they don't do that kind of thing, when they don't let players blaze trails, build castles, conquer kingdoms and so forth.  Even if you're using a canned world (as I do, with Greyhawk), I mean...come on, there's hundreds of "empty" map hexes there: stuff happens in there!  My WGH3-5 series spans two hexes of The Howling Hills: I don't expect (and I hope it wouldn't be) that DMs just plod from Dungeon to Dungeon without "stuff" happening therein.

But that's just me; I could be wrong.

Quote from: winkingbishop;382837I think you got what I was asking.  Is the original game more about going from adventure to adventure or is it about living day-to-day as your character?

It's about exploring sites ripe with adventure opportunities.

Quote from: winkingbishop;382837I think you got what I was asking.  Is the original game more about going from adventure to adventure or is it about living day-to-day as your character?

Well, this is not a 'nominal' scale question. The ratio between one versus the other might well be called the 'sandbox ratio' of a game.  Even in the most stringent, detailed sandbox, we don't regulate how often a person takes a dump (nor check the chart for the appropriate experience), though I do keep tabs on bathing.  I still allow hand waving of a few days at a time, though my groups mainly don't use it.

Now, the very original game was just about playing in a dungeon.  There was no outdoor adventures, etc.  The very early growth of the game mainly deals with the growth from your first situation into more of the second.

Quote from: Benoist;382831When 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.

So what you are talking about is the game as it was run by a very small number of people for a fairly brief period of time.

Quote from: winkingbishop;382837I think you got what I was asking.  Is the original game more about going from adventure to adventure or is it about living day-to-day as your character?

It doesn't have to be one or the other.  In one part of the campaign, the characters can come to a Keep on the Borderlands and get involved in exploring the area, becoming involved with the inhabitants, become major players at the Keep, or even eventually coming to own it.  Or they could leave, joining a merchant caravan as guards.  That journey as guards could be a simple description as nothing eventful happens, possibly with npc interactions, or it could be a hour-by-hour adventure that lasts months of real time before the characters arrive at their destination.  Somewhere in there you can come across a small village that seems to be under a curse, and try to solve the mystery and break the curse.

The key to the original game is that it wasn't about THIS ONE THING.  It was about the imagination.

Quote from: John Morrow;382846So what you are talking about is the game as it was run by a very small number of people for a fairly brief period of time.

What I'm talking about is "the early game".

Quote from: winkingbishop;382811Yeah.  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."

A "rudderless" sandbox D&D game, will start to resemble "running around killing cops, see what happens".  I've played sandbox D&D games which resembled this.  This was typically the case when the players had no idea what they really want to do and/or there was no strong take-charge leader type of person playing.

Quote from: winkingbishop;382798Reflecting 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.

That's the way we played. Buying TSR products since 1979, we saw many examples of dungeons and adventures. Precious few of sandbox worlds. Greyhawk was a neat read, but offered very little support for a boots on the ground sandbox campaign (so Almor can field 600 heavy cavalry and 1,200 medium infantry in times of war, and exports cloth and diamonds... interesting. But what in the fuck does that mean to my band of 3rd level PCs tramping across the countryside?).

So using the TSR modules as models, we created our own dungeons. And that was the unit of play - dungeons. One dungeon after another - some published dungeons, and some that we made up. We would start the session reading out the Background section of the dungeons, and then the Start. And off we went. Occassionaly we'd throw in a city adventure, or some random outdoor encounters.

I did know one DM in grade 11 who spent the whole summer creating a sandbox campaign world, using some of his own material and a lot of content from the City State of the World Emperor. But creating and running that campaign was a task of enormous time and effort. Only a totally dedicated DM with a lot of time on his hands would undertake such a task. And being 15, my friends and I had a lot of better things to do with our summer.

But in the end I wouldn't worry about how people played (or say they played) back in 1981. We've seen a lot of Old School Orthodoxy creep into online forums over the last couple years, and it seems driven by equal parts resentment of the modern paradigm and one-true-wayism. And frankly, I'm skeptical how much is even true.

Quote from: winkingbishop;382805Right, 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.  

Dungeons certainly were the default unit in the early game. You can look at early Dragon magazine articles that encourage DMs to occasionally take the game out of the dungeon and into the wilderness or a town. But even the wilderness and town tips were writting like dungeons - encouter levels and random tables. And they were presented as occasional diversion from the main setting - the dungeon(s).

I can see perfectly how someone could draw this conclusion in 1979-1980, if introduced to the game via TSR adventure modules. That's what the publications of the time suggested - they were self-contained and largely finite, even if a lot more open than post-Hickman adventures. Conversely, even older materials, which truly embodied the original "complex, open-ended simulation" ideal of D&D, were not universally available. Nonetheless, if we look at these documents of play - Temple of the Frog, early Judges Guild supplement, Empire of the Petal Throne etc. - they are all sandbox-like to some extent:
a) they don't have much in the way of concrete goals beyond implied ones ("get rich", "go up levels", "defeat your opponents")
b) they are networks filled with adventure possibilities instead of directed paths; movement is typically fairly free in them and can flow in more than direction;
c) they are open scenarios with a lot of links radiating off from them, instead of keeping the action contained.
This, to me, points at strongly freeform campaigns. In fact, a lot of the really early games Gygax and others recounted weren't so much adventures but "what ifs" - what happens if I paint that wizard's tower with stripes? What happens if I play a vampire? What happens if I counter that vampire with a cleric?

This is, of course, not all evident from even the AD&D core books, and especially not basic (which was probably too focused for its own good).

I will add that Greyhawk, as published in the Folio and the Boxed Set editions, does not really invite someone to play sandbox games: since the scale is too big, it is more context, and a tool to get the players go from one adventure to another. Contrast that to the Wilderlands or Blackmoor (or Traveller!), where the "going" is the "doing".

Quote from: Haffrung;382862I did know one DM in grade 11 who spent the whole summer creating a sandbox campaign world, using some of his own material and a lot of content from the City State of the World Emperor. But creating and running that campaign was a task of enormous time and effort. Only a totally dedicated DM with a lot of time on his hands would undertake such a task. And being 15, my friends and I had a lot of better things to do with our summer.

That sounds like creating a full world, though, and not just running a campaign. The latter can be done with very little preparatory work by always staying two steps before the players (by developing a few adventure areas in their vicinity) or even letting things emerge as they go. That's how my first campaign went, and that wasn't even 1st but 2nd edition. Of course, some people may not call that a proper sandbox since it's not all fully established beforehand. Well, I call it a fun and relatively effortless way to run a campaign.

Quote from: LordVreeg;382845Now, the very original game was just about playing in a dungeon.

No, not really. We should be clear about whether we're talking about the pre-publication gaming in Blackmoor and Greyhawk, or the actual written guidelines in original D&D and 1e.

So, pre-publication, there's the oft-cited genesis of D&D, described by Greg Svenson, which was an expedition to the bowels of Blackmoor Castle. But very soon after that, Arneson was running outdoor adventures, e.g. for Robert the Bald, and it was very clear that there was a wider setting-based continuity. Meanwhile, Gygax's group had multiple "Greyhawk" campaigns using the Avalon Hill Outdoor Survival map as the basis.

At publication, all these practices are set forth in rules. Again, all you have to do is look.

Sources:

http://shamsgrog.blogspot.com/2009/05/q-with-greg-svenson.html
http://blackmoor.mystara.us/svenny.html
http://mmrpg.zeitgeistgames.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=printview&t=594&start=0
http://lordofthegreendragons.blogspot.com/2009/03/first-living-campaign.html

Also, I've talked about D&D roots in several posts at my livejournal. IMNSHO you could do worse than to look at http://ewilen.livejournal.com/tag/rpg%20history.

This should also answer the OP's request for sources. I could go and cite pages from the books but I have only so much time for the whack-a-mole game of refuting idle, sourceless speculation.

Quote from: Eliot

Quote from: Originally Posted by LordVreegNow, the very original game was just about playing in a dungeon.

No, not really. We should be clear about whether we're talking about the pre-publication gaming in Blackmoor and Greyhawk, or the actual written guidelines in original D&D and 1e.

So, pre-publication, there's the oft-cited genesis of D&D, described by Greg Svenson, which was an expedition to the bowels of Blackmoor Castle. But very soon after that, Arneson was running outdoor adventures, e.g. for Robert the Bald, and it was very clear that there was a wider setting-based continuity. Meanwhile, Gygax's group had multiple "Greyhawk" campaigns using the Avalon Hill Outdoor Survival map as the basis.

At publication, all these practices are set forth in rules. Again, all you have to do is look.

Sources:

http://shamsgrog.blogspot.com/2009/0...g-svenson.html
http://blackmoor.mystara.us/svenny.html
http://mmrpg.zeitgeistgames.com/inde...&t=594&start=0
http://lordofthegreendragons.blogspo...-campaign.html

Also, I've talked about D&D roots in several posts at my livejournal. IMNSHO you could do worse than to look at http://ewilen.livejournal.com/tag/rpg%20history.

This should also answer the OP's request for sources. I could go and cite pages from the books but I have only so much time for the whack-a-mole game of refuting idle, sourceless speculation.

Well, with the same information looked at (sans your blog, no insult intended), I still come up with the same change of focus.  And I think this is because I see it from pre-publication omward.  It is not a black and white thing, but a continual change of focus that went on until 1e was published (so some feel 2e was even more campaign focused).  It is apparent from any source that the movement away from the pure dungeon enviroment happenned early, however, and on this I would not disagree with you.

Vol. 3 of the original game is entitled "The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures". It discusses both approaches within. I think that wrongfully redefining the original game as "just dungeons" is a meme that was born in part due to a reaction to the way dungeon crawling was practiced, which seemed boring and limited to some players of the game, up to the point where alternate, and to them, "better" ways of gaming were developed professionally (I'm thinking about Call of Cthulhu, for instance, which had in France an enormous influence on the way gamers came to view D&D as an "obsolete, limited game" where one would just play in a "Porte-Monstre-Trésor"/PMT, i.e. "Room-Monster-Treasure" fashion).