I outlined upthread (somewhere near the beginning) what I felt are the most fundamental pieces of machinery/feedbacks that creates any singular sequence of play in traditional D&D and the holistic experience:
Ok.
1) A mapped/keyed/scaled/stocked environment (primarily dungeon but possibly wilderness...where the game's machinery is put under pressure).
That is a procedure of play, not a rule of the system. It has to do with how you prepare to play the game and think about playing the game, but it's not an inherent aspect of the game. You still could be playing traditional D&D and not have any of those things. I know, I was in a game that was largely without them as early as 1990.
2) The exploration turn (and rules that interface with it such as distances, what is feasible in the interval, action resolution, rest requirements, PC build tools, equipment/spell load-out).
There could be vastly different procedures of play around exploration, generating different 'bangs' (in the modern parlance) and different applications of the rules to resolve player propositions in the resulting difficulties.
3) The Wandering Monster/Random Encounter "Clock" (which pressures 2 and doesn't reward resource-ablating combat).
Which is again a procedure of play and not an absolute requirement of traditional D&D play. DMs would have wandering monsters and random encounter checks if they made sense, and would not have them if they did not. Disagree? Please explain to me how "Tomb of Horrors" is not a traditional D&D adventure, and if it is not whether there is actually any meaning to this analysis given the enormous amount of old school play that is not traditional by your narrow definition.
4) Monster Reaction Rolls.
Technically a rule, maybe, but one that was treated more like a guideline than a rule and frequently observed mostly by the breach. This is because it only made sense in certain situations and DMs would have widely foregone the 'rule' based on whether they thought the rule was appropriately simulating something. Indeed, I'd pretty much insist 90% of the DMG consisted of guidelines of this sort intended to help the DM simulate scenarios but not intended to be contractual obligations between the DM and the player - the rules being secret, the players could not complain that the DM was somehow in breech of a contract. Nor for that matter does the DMG present itself as a table contract. It presents itself as mentoring and guiding a DM based on the mastery of the game communicated by the books author. This is a very different situation than exists in post-Indy game systems.
Assumed for the most part unspoken as a desirable procedure of play, but not actually a part of the rules. Nor for that matter can you necessarily sustain the idea that the frequently adversarial tone of the DM was expected to take is exactly the same as "neutral refereeing", and while it was frequently spoken of in denigrating terms at the time, as a matter of simple fact many traditional D&D tables did not have neutral refereeing as a procedure of play and while it would have been frowned on DMs that did not use neutral refereeing (for whatever reason) were still playing the game by the rules.
6) Potential adventuring day dynamics/potential rest availability/opportunity cost resource-based decision-making by players.
Potentially, sure, but only as a procedure of play, not as a part of the rules. While the DMG very much assumes a haven/dungeon delve format where rest and recovery are big part of play, even by the time the book was printed a very large number of tables where at least at times telling very different sorts of stories where those guidelines were ignored as irrelevant. It's not like an event driven scenario was invented in the 1990's, or that urban adventuring and political intrigue games were unknown in the 1980's. Heck, dungeon crawling itself began as an outgrowth of such play intended to represent an interesting change of pace in the game. Traditionally D&D players saw themselves as simulating an entire fantastic world and the rules exist to resolve disputes and conflicts within that world, not to describe what play in that world was like or was limited to.
7) XP for gold/treasure (which again, doesn't reward getting into unnecessary combats).
This is the only portion of the list that is what I would think of as an actual rule that was observed as a rule. Certainly I'm unaware of anyone deprecating this rule prior to the 2e era. But, the implication that you draw from this rule, namely that good play avoid getting into unnecessary combats is based not off the rule, but upon procedures of play. I know, because I've been in games were no combat was seen as unnecessary ("if the duck is worth XP, I'm going to kill me some ducks"), and conversely urban thief based campaigns where stealing from the good guys and not getting caught was the order of the day. (A mentor of mine, his PC group spent all of B2: Keep on the Borderlands, planning a heist of the Keep.) Again, whether the table play evolved to this depends on how you prepare for play and the procedures of monster generation and treasure allocation being used at the table. 1e AD&D gives multiple suggested guidelines in different places for how treasure is to be generated and described, and in practice the ratio of monster slain XP to treasure XP could vary widely. I've been in games where the available treasure XP exceeded monster XP by 10:1 (you killed monsters only as necessary to get the loot), and where monster XP and treasure XP were about equal (you killed anything your alignment and capabilities allowed). That depends on procedures of play adopted by the DM.
From many conversations in the past you know I'm very much a "system matters" advocate; rules, play procedures, play agenda and principles guide the conversation that we're having at the table and incline the mental overhead of all participants at the table toward certain things (rather than others). I don't think that is a particularly controversial claim to make.
No, but inclinations and generalizations aren't the same as actual descriptions, and the vast majority of processes of play at a table are not guided by the rules. This is doubly true in the case of traditional RPing where the rules themselves don't tightly describe the processes of play the way something like Dungeon World or FATE does.
I think it should be clear how the player of the Fighter, the player of the Rogue, and the player of the Wizard are dealing with different kinds of cognitive workload and different priorities (which creates different sorts of decision-points and attendant outcomes), sum total a different play paradigm, than that of traditional D&D.
Speaking as a guy that played a lot of old school D&D, not in the slightest. I've actually been in an AD&D game where we were crawling around the post apocalyptic ruins of a medieval city fighting invaders like a team of commandos fighting robot Terminators in while an alien space craft hovered in the air over it. And that was almost 3 decades ago. I played a Thief for years. Cognative workload didn't depend on the system. It depended on whether I was on point in a dungeon crawl, spying out a city, building a trap with my intimate knowledge of trap mechanics, managing the Guild, or negotiating a peace treaty on behalf of the fighter Lord who'd carved out his hold in the wilderness. It depended on the story we were telling, which wasn't constrained by the system like you seem to think.
As certain handbooks and articles came out, D&D culture began to drift to this heavy mash of the traditional concepts above and the growing sim priorities (throwing things out like xp for Treasure/Gold, not using Wandering Monsters because they weren't "realistic" for the ecosystem etc). But I don't call that traditional D&D. I'd call that the 2nd wave of D&D.
Again, Tomb of Horrors has no Wandering Encounters. And we are very quickly going to be in to a No True Scotsman fallacy here. You are retroactively defining what D&D is limited to in a way that no one I knew of at the time would have. You've got this "System Matters" paradigm going, and you are retroactively assuming that it functioned in 1980's D&D based on principles - not based on what actually happened at tables in 1980's D&D.
Then the Dragonlancing of D&D came about with all of the White Wolf and LARPing influences as a massive influx of Illusionism/Force, big setting, big metaplot took hold. I'd call that the 3rd wave of D&D, but I certainly wouldn't call it Trad D&D.
The Dragonlancing of D&D? Didn't Dragonlance itself come out in like 1986, well before LARPing and White Wolf and so forth? Again, you are fitting the data to your theory, not your theory to the data.
