I haven't read the whole thread, but I suggest taking a look at the First Fantasy Campaign.  It's very evident that the campaign was more than just the dungeon, with territorial incomes and orders of battles (i.e. resources to be managed), ways to invest/spend your resources, et cetera.  Also, consider all the rules in The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures that relate to, well, the wilderness adventure.  

I think the campaign world as a "sandbox" and playing field with verisimilitude was an important part of the early game.  Gary's emphasis on the importance of keeping track of time for a good campaign is another example, and is something that makes the most sense when you're looking at the campaign from that perspective.

Dungeons have always been popular and important, of course.  They're an ideal place to manage class/level based play, and the "underworld" aspect gives you all sorts of opportunities to inject the mystical and fantastic.  I don't think the importance of dungeons should be minimized, but I also think that the idea of the campaign as a sandboxy playing field and of "playing the campaign" as part of the game was overlooked by many as D&D became more popular.  I think part of that is that dungeons (and particularly smaller, lair and tournament style dungeons) suited publication as modules and became the public's "view" of how a D&D game is played.

Quote from: Benoist;382907Vol. 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).

Again, I agree to this.  We (and I) tend to remember the game as it was often practiced and also the very earliest origins of the game, but even the pre-publication Blackmoor was much more than a pure dungeon adventure, and gained scope and depth rapidly.  It became sandbox-y very quickly.

Quote from: LordVreeg;382912Again, I agree to this.  We (and I) tend to remember the game as it was often practiced and also the very earliest origins of the game, but even the pre-prublication Blackmoor was much more than a pure dungeon adventure.  It became sandbox-y very quickly.

Absolutely. I actually knew we were on the same page.

Quote from: LordVreeg;382894It 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.

Double negative! You are officially Frenchified, Sir!

Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;382910Dungeons have always been popular and important, of course.  They're an ideal place to manage class/level based play, and the "underworld" aspect gives you all sorts of opportunities to inject the mystical and fantastic.  I don't think the importance of dungeons should be minimized, but I also think that the idea of the campaign as a sandboxy playing field and of "playing the campaign" as part of the game was overlooked by many as D&D became more popular.  I think part of that is that dungeons (and particularly smaller, lair and tournament style dungeons) suited publication as modules and became the public's "view" of how a D&D game is played.

This is tied to my earlier remarks. Many focused on the dungeoneering experience of the game, and as a result of mis-GMing, or one-dimensional games, players started to wish there was more to it than just going from room to room, "killing things and taking their stuff". That, and the wish for less abstraction in the rules of the game, resulted in variants (like the Perrin Conventions), which ultimately led to the publications of other RPGs (RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu).

I wonder how much of this can be blamed on the Gygaxian AD&Desque approach to the game, as opposed to the Arnesonian Campaign approach.

Quote from: LordVreeg;382894Well, with the same information looked at (sans your blog, no insult intended), I still come up with the same change of focus.

Well, I would point you to a few things from my blog that actually show a change of focus in the opposite direction.

http://theminiaturespage.com/boards/msg.mv?id=136167

QuoteArneson first started running games involving fantasy characters apart from armies. EGG and DLA were, respectively, President and Vice President of the Castles and Crusades Society, the medieval wing of the International Federation of Wargamers. Individual members were assigned fiefs and encouraged to have miniatures battles (using the official Chainmail rules, of course) with each other. When the edition of Chainmail with the fantasy matrix came out, members began including fantasy units in their armies, much to EGG's distress.

Arneson's group was part of this, but quickly began to add things like "Horsepucky the Barbarian wants to sneak into Lord Funt's castel and steal his magic sword". Dave obliged. Soon, the quests and secret missions began to be more frequent than the battles. And action became localized in the vicinity of Blackmoor Castle.Finally, it evolved into the classic dungeon crawl.

(Emphases mine.) Now, that's a secondhand account. But check out what Greg Svenson, who was in Arneson's group, says.
http://blackmoor.mystara.us/svenny.html

QuoteDuring the winter of 1970-71, our gaming group was meeting in Dave Arneson's basement in St. Paul, Minnesota. We had been playing a big Napoleonics campaign which was getting bogged down in long drawn out miniatures battles. So, as a diversion for the group, one weekend Dave set up Blackmoor instead of Napoleonics on his ping pong table. The rules we used were based on "Chainmail", which is a set of medieval miniature rules with a fantasy supplement allowing for magic and various beings found in the "Lord of the Rings". I had never played any games like it before, although I had read "Lord of the Rings". Other members of the group had played the game before, but always doing adventures in and around the town of Blackmoor. By the end of the weekend I had fallen in love with the game.

On this particular weekend, Dave tried a new winkle for the game. He had been working all week to prepare a map of tunnels and catacombs under the town and especially under the castle.

(Emphasis mine.) As this is Greg Svenson's account of the "first dungeon adventure", it indicates that campaign-based roleplaying had preceded dungeoneering.

Quote from: winkingbishop;382832Is it about what Tim encounters in every hex of his life or is it hand-waving between Dungeons X & Y?

It's the sane middle ground between those insane extremes.

Yes, players can refuse to go into The Temple of Elemental Stupidity, and given my experiences playing it, I wouldn't blame them. But there's got to be some co-operation between players and GM. The GM's job is to present interesting adventure possibilities, the player's job is to accept them. The GM should make it interesting enough that the players don't want to refuse, but the players should be interested in things and want to grab adventure hooks. It's a co-operative thing.

The adventure hooks ain't just, "phat loot, kids!" You can go a bit thespy and look at the character's background and traits. Again, some co-operation here. If the player creates a character whose village were slain by an evil sorceror, well then when the character goes to town and there's a temple run by that sorceror, and the sorceror's trying to take over the kingdom - well then the hook's obvious. The GM made an effort to tie things into the background the player came up with, the player should respect that and not just say, "I leave town." If the player's not interested in slaying evil sorcerors, then the player ought not to put "an evil sorceror slew my family" in their character's background.

It's a co-operative thing. It's neither pure sandbox nor pure railroad. Either of those by themselves is stupid.

Quote from: Haffrung;382862That's the way we played. Buying TSR products since 1979, we saw many examples of dungeons and adventures. Precious few of sandbox worlds.

I started playing before there was a single published adventure. The Blackmoor supplement wasn't out yet, so there wasn't even Temple of the Frog to look at, just the material in Book 3 which was as much about the wildnerness as it was about dungeons. The groups I played with started with dungeons and tried to do wilderness (with my Outdoor Survival map to start with), but dropped wilderness as too dangerous -- random encounter with a tribe of 30d10 orcs or bandits!  

Then I came up with the idea that that many creatures couldn't wonder around the wilderness undetected (at least not normally). You would run into small scouting parties or the like before you'd just happen upon a roving tribe of 200 orc warriors and their females and children. With the wilderness no long an almost automatic death sentence, wilderness adventuring became also as common as dungeon adventuring in our neck of the woods (by mid-1976 at the latest).

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;382921Well, I would point you to a few things from my blog that actually show a change of focus in the opposite direction.

http://theminiaturespage.com/boards/msg.mv?id=136167(Emphases mine.) Now, that's a secondhand account. But check out what Greg Svenson, who was in Arneson's group, says.
http://blackmoor.mystara.us/svenny.html(Emphasis mine.) As this is Greg Svenson's account of the "first dungeon adventure", it indicates that campaign-based roleplaying had preceded dungeoneering.

See, this kind of thing annoys me.

Sure, now that we have internet it's pretty cool to read about how Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax ran their campaigns. What those guys and a few hundred like them did back before the game was commercial is genuinely fascinating and impressive.

However, once the game exploded in the late 70s, the way Gygax and Arneson played became fucking irrelevent. Once 95 per cent of the people who played D&D learned from the books and not from sitting at a table in Lake Geneva, those books defined how people played the game.

Go read your early Dragon magazines. They talk about occasionally taking play out of the dungeon. And by 'the dungeon' they explicitly meant the single dungeon where the PCs adventured. And it's a safe bet that even in its earliest issues there were 10 or 20 gamers who learned about D&D from Dragon magazine for every gamer who had the faintest idea of the First Fantasy Campaign or how Gygax ran Greyhawk.

So yeah, I'm fucking tired of these retroactive definitions of how the game was meant to played - definitions that have only been formulated in the last 5 or 6 years due to the internet. The way Gygax and Arneson played are little more than historical curiosities. Once the game was selling in the tens of thousands its the kids who bought and read the rules, Dragon magazine, and published modules in their basement rec rooms who defined the game.

Quote from: RandallS;382934I started playing before there was a single published adventure.

Cool. I'm sure you and the 2,000 or so D&D players at that time had some pretty fun gaming.

Maybe this all comes down to how we define old-school. Does the fact that there are a couple dozen guys kicking around internet forums who played D&D before 1978 mean that those early days define old-school? Or does the initial commercial explosion of the Blue Box Holmes set still count as old-school? Because the experiences of those two groups, the latter one probably 20 times the size of the former, were very different. And the experiences of those who learned from Moldvay/Cook  - a group 20 times bigger again - are they old-school?

It's just weird how many guys I've come across on forums in the last few years who started playing in the early 80s and seem abashed that they didn't play the way Gygax and Arneson played in 1975. It smacks of a kind of revival of Old Testament fundamentalism - a latter-day deference to the original scripture.

well, first we look at the OP...dealing with SAndboxing and how it is seen.

Then we have a few dozen threads recntly asking about the different foci of a game (encounter, dungeon, Adventure, Campaign)

Then we have Eliot's backed up data (most of which I've seen but have always considered rare and stratified), which shows us that Sandboxing was not always a later development but was a concurrent development to the game.

My particular background is more Like Randalls, with an older brother of my best friend inflciting gaming onto us.  We always played dungeon style games, but he always added campaign pieces, and this was very early...it's just that we were a little younger and more dungeon oriented.

Now I come to the same conclusion I did before, that Sandbox is a ratio, never completely 100%, but the amount of emphasis placed on non-adventure playing being a part of it, (as opposed to the other extreme, the afore mentioned moving from adventure to adventure, not playing the 'in-between' time).

Quote from: Haffrung;382935So yeah, I'm fucking tired of these retroactive definitions of how the game was meant to played - definitions that have only been formulated in the last 5 or 6 years due to the internet. The way Gygax and Arneson played are little more than historical curiosities. Once the game was selling in the tens of thousands its the kids who bought and read the rules, Dragon magazine, and published modules in their basement rec rooms who defined the game.

It's not a "retroactive definition". You can read the original game for yourself. You can check out for yourself the accounts of guys who were there at the time. Whatever Dragon mag et al. were assuming came after. Sure, you can say "yeah well, what a few hundred people did with the game at the beginning is irrelevant to me". That's fine. Sure.

That doesn't retroactively erase their own experience of said game.

And to me, what a few hundred thousands, or millions, people were doing with the game in this or that year is far less relevant to my game table than what the guys who came up with the game were doing themselves. Why? Because I enjoy this stuff now.

YMMV and all that.

Playing before there was a single published module available from TSR meant that the game world had to be constructed, pretty much from scratch, using the white books and the very few available supplements published, along with articles from SR, Dragon, Pegasus, and JG Journal.

Ready Ref Sheets for example, if not used for the Wilderlands, but hacked for a homebrew D&D campaign, was extremely sandbox, using a host of tables and charts to randomly generate a session, setting, or campaign area for the players.

Aside from B1/B2 that came with the basic set, I never bought a module for D&D until the 1990's. I played in a few, of course, that other GMs purchased, however always thought it was more important to create a unique fantasy world or campaign for the players.

Plus, as a player if they could buy the module and read it themselves before playing, they could game the system itself. Not having a published module meant that the players all started a session or campaign on an even footing, and emphasized a focus on what the players would do, and how they would act.

This, I prefered to run (and still do), as opposed to a published setting, adventure, or campaign. If something better comes along, I would run games for the new shiny, but haven't seen much in this regard.

Note that I do like and would run the Eberron campaign setting, and a few of the 3e adventures like Forge of Fury, Twin Crowns, and the Sicaris/Arcanis campaign setting. I also bootstrap the best material from all of those and drop that into my homebrew setting, sometimes with a twist and sometimes straight up.

I'd like to give KingMaker a shakedown as well, just haven't had an opportunity to do that yet.

Quote from: Haffrung;382940It's just weird how many guys I've come across on forums in the last few years who started playing in the early 80s and seem abashed that they didn't play the way Gygax and Arneson played in 1975. It smacks of a kind of revival of Old Testament fundamentalism - a latter-day deference to the original scripture.

My guess is that you're just seeing what you want to see. Confirmation bias.

Quote from: Benoist;382944My guess is that you're just seeing what you want to see. Confirmation bias.

You can say that you talk solely about your gaming preferences all you want, and you could care less about what anyone else does. If you do that, you don't get to tell other people what AD&D is. You can't have it both ways.