Knights & Knaves Alehouse

As far as I can remember, back in the day (which means the late 80s early 90s to me, as far as AD&D is concerned), there was, back in France, very much of an assumed default playstyle as far as the "pros" of the game were concerned.

Basically, the AD&D DM was expected to be a "rat bastard" DM, and every dungeon exploration would turn into a "Tomb of Horrors", uber-lethal, death-with-no-save kind of experience, where only the fittest and smartest players would ever be able to make it.

This "Tomb of Horrors" default sort of devolved IME into a reputation for the whole game, which basically stated that either A/ Dungeon crawling was boring in the hands of bad DMs and amounted to Door-Monster-Treasure, "kill things and take their stuff" repetitive experiences, or B/ Games with good DMs amounted to reading said DM's minds, so hard and frustrating the adventures were, on purpose.

So my question is: how widespread was the S-series, "Tomb of Horrors" style of play during AD&D's heyday? Was it a sort of "default" playstyle in some areas of the US, or anywhere, for that matter? How do you think the game evolved to become such a caricature of itself in some people's minds?

Perhaps I am in the minority here, but I think it's often misleading to look to many of the earliest AD&D modules as representative of anything other than the culture of RPG tournaments at the time. By their very nature, tournament adventures have to be different than adventures intended for regular campaign use and, while many tournament adventures, when published, were expanded and made more open-ended (to some degree), they nevertheless feel -- to me anyway -- very "cramped" and unpleasantly "focused." Tomb of Horrors, for example, is a truly clever dungeon and it's dripping with characteristically Gygaxian elements, but it's not what I'd point to as the epitome of Gygaxian adventure design, nor indeed of 1e adventure design more generally.

That’s right. Note that Gary’s campaign dungeons (Castle Greyhawk and Temple of Elemental Evil) follow the model described in OD&D, and never got “reset”. Whatever Robilar did there permanently affected the dungeon, and future players’ experience of it. Not so for Tomb of Horrors. It was designed for tournaments, and therefore it was “reset” every time it was run. So Robilar’s experience of it when Gary ran him through it (he was not the first, if I recall correctly) was basically the same as if you or I ran the published module.

Tomb of Horrors was obviously intended to be extreme: a killer dungeon. Although Gary often expressed that he was impressed at Rob’s dungeon adventuring skills, he was perhaps doubly impressed that he survived ToH. In other words, he wasn’t supposed to survive. I think that if Robilar had died in ToH that it wouldn’t have been “real.” But I’m not sure.

Of course, what Gary intended isn’t always what people did. Still, ToH wouldn’t be as legendary as it is if it were common. Another indicator that it was uncommon is that nobody else wrote a module like it (that I can think of). Perhaps the “default” module was (or ought to have been) WG5 Mordenkainen’s Fantastic Adventure. It is still in the style of ToH in that it emphasizes unique rooms with unique encounters that require outside-the-box thinking (and classes like Thief and Monk really break this kind of module, by the way), without being an insanely dangerous killer dungeon. Unfortunately, this module was published so late in the game, that I think most people wrote off ToH as a one-of-a-kind and instead the actual “default” was the grind of the G-series (until the Hickman model took off).

There's a disconnect because the default play-style presented in the rulebooks (the ongoing-campaign model where what the characters do in-town between adventures is just as important, or moreso, than what they do in the dungeons or wilderness, where each character is established in the world as an individual beyond just a member of an adventuring party) isn't the same as what's presented in the modules (canned, episodic locations and plots). If you run the modules as-written (with the boxed-text intros that get the party to the dungeon door and such) your game won't look much like what's presented in the rulebooks, and vice versa (which is to say if you're running the type of campaign the rulebooks describe you won't be able to use modules as-written). Of all the modules, only B2, T1, and L1 come close to what's depicted in the rulebooks, and even with those there's more direction than what the rulebooks imply -- there's no real support, for instance, for characters using Hommlett or The Keep as a home-base but doing something other than exploring the TOEE or Caves of Chaos (L1 is more truly open-ended, but IMO that's outweighed by its overall blandness -- sure there's lots of different stuff to do and you have a great deal of freedom in doing it, but none of it's very interesting).

So I don't think it's really possible to define a single across-the-board default play style for 1E -- those who followed the example of the rulebooks would have a different default than those who followed the modules, and those who followed the modules would have different defaults than each other depending on which modules they followed. So the S1 model was almost certainly the default for some groups, while for others it was the G series, or the A series, or the U series, etc. -- all of which would obviously lead to very different assumptions about what the game is and how it's expected to work.

If there were/are as many play styles at game tables than there were styles of modules, additionally to the default DMG style, is it fair to say that a majority of AD&D's legacy in terms of game play owes to the modules, more than the DMG? (I'm thinking, on a side note, about the legions of DM I knew who actually didn't read the DMG but were just using its tables during game play, adding to my perception here)

Its fair to say that there were trends reflecting module releases (a DM using fresh ideas that he might see in a module over and over, one example was the up tick in involved plots (possibly starting with DL) in the mid-80s to late 80s that infected DM's home made stuff. Even I am guilty of doing this over-plotted style (after cleaning out some of my closet last month I found some of my God offal plot driven modules from the 90s) it had been unintentional, but seemed like what everyone else was doing at the time. That said, I dont think Tomb of Horrors was particularly influential in the way you experienced gaming. For one thing, back then we were sticklers for level advancement so few had PCs high enough to even attempt that module. And if you did you wouldn't want to waste them that quickly. Plus the DM didn't need to work on being a killer, that was already his reputation, usually undeserved.

I think Foster makes a good point about there being two styles, one when playing modules and another when playing BTB. The way I remember it, the modules only trickled out, so most of the time we were relying on home made stuff. So, in that case, I'd say that was the default way of playing 70% of the time. Plus, back then, DMs were more into their own stuff then buying modules, TSR hadn't figured out modules were part of the gravy train (and making your own world was preferable to what you'd buy, and half the fun for the DM). In our case, modules were only used to break the monotony of a DMs style. They also helped the DMing from drifting too far off (where the simple dungeon might become rare or even forgotten completely, as the players grew bored of the DMs same old tricks underground). I always considered the early modules partly as rule additions where ideas about how the game should work could more clearly be illustrated.

The "killer DM", at the opposite extreme of "Monty Haul", seems to have been around (and deprecated) from early days. The ideal for campaigns was to have a range of challenges, with greater rewards for greater risks, from which players could choose. The dungeon level scheme, for instance, pretty clearly set up such options.

A "module" is just that -- a mere part -- in a campaign context. In a tournament, it's the whole scenario. Moreover, the purposes of a tournament call for putting all teams to the same tests, and for some clear basis for scoring. A fairly linear meat grinder, in which it's easy to judge how far from the start the bodies fall, serves very well.

What I saw on the West Coast USA, and in AD&D modules (deriving, it appeared, mainly from the Midwest USA and the UK), in the late 1980s, was a trend toward "story-driven" scenarios. Those tended to require not high but low body counts, as their plot lines depended on character continuity.

I think in terms of my age group, at my school ... which had enough cross-over to cover several schools in terms of the play-style, we were more influenced by B1 as the "model" for designing an adventure. But I started playing I think a year or two before the game really caught on in a big way with younger players like me. I was already in those game stores because (somehow) I was into Napoleonic minis at the age of ten, so I saw the D&D stuff on shelves early on.

So I can't speak to how "everyone" played it, and I don't believe there was an "everyone." But in my particular area, the less-lethal, multi-level, resetting mega-dungeon, where monsters were the primary risk, was the assumed model. And outdoor adventuring, mainly in Blackmoor and later Greyhawk, using the DMG outdoor adventuring tables while exploring. Not so much the trap-laden killer dungeon.

Not sure how much the passage of time is coloring my memory of it, but that's what I recall...

Our dungeons tended to be the endless megadungeon type. There were aspects of Monty Haul as well as the Killer DM to some extent. I don't remember much outdoor adventuring until we started playing MERP. Usually each level of the dungeon would be infested by one type of monster but there would also be wandering monsters. One level would always fill a whole page of graph and typically there would only be one way down and one way up but there were a few cases of stairs that led to deeper levels. There may have been an elevator at some point as well. I remember camping in the dungeon a lot, we didn't always return to the surface. The mortality rate was pretty high, too.

I have a long post that I started on this topic (comparing convention/tourney modules to standard/campaign modules) back in November 2009, but I don't have time to finish it now: it will have to wait a couple weeks for my return from Lithuania, Latvia, and St. Petersberg.