examples of (proto-)tailoring in what you're isolating (and seemingly trying to dismiss) as that early period.
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on the one hand we're dismissing the standard gameplay of the first five to seven years from which only one or two exceptions of that standard are cited as so early it is a blip in the timeline of RPGing but in the same post we're also reaching forward over 25 years later to cite rules where the early proto-tailoring is finally fleshed out.
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the leap you are making from that seems to simultaneously need to dismiss the first five to seven years of RPG development as insignificant
I don't understand what any of this is talking about - especically your repeated use of the word "dismiss".
[MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] and I asserted that early in the history of RPGing, including D&D play, you can find various forms of player influence on the game that occur other than through action declarations that give effect to the ingame capabilities of the PC.
We have both pointed to AD&D rules text that illustrates this in various ways:
* the paladin's quest for a warhorse, in which the player use of a PC ability, which obliges the GM to prepare a mini-scenario that might otherwise not have been part of the gameworld;
* the design of dungeons for the PCs to explore, including ("if the DM is kind") creating dungeons in remote wilderness areas for PCs who are out-of-sync with the "main" timeline to explore;
* advice by Gygax to ignore the default (random) content generation procedures in order to facilitiate exciting and interesting episodes of gameplay.
Pointing to these bits of text isn't "dismissing" anything. It's indicating that player infuence on the content of the gameworld isn't an idea that sprang forth, unheralded, in the past ten-to-fifteen years. AD&D clearly recognised that one thing a GM might want to have regard to, in designing and placing world elements and making them salient to the players via their PCs, was player engagement and interest.
If you and other players you know didn't take that sort of advice, or never encountered problems of reconciling GM-driven world-building with player engagement, all that shows that I can see is that the ideas and advice offered by Gygax, and taken further by others, weren't helpful to you. That wouldn't be the first time (in RPGing or in life more generally) that advice wasn't universally useful.
You only need to label something as such if it isn't the default by design
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The labeling of sandbox play doesn't come until there are other forms of play beginning to become popular.
The mass uptake of D&D began in the late 70s and early 80s. Most of those players learned from one of the Basic sets - I think Moldvay was the most popular - or the AD&D rulebooks.
Neither Moldvay Basic nor Gygax's DMG explains world-exploration sandbox play. They explain dungeon design, and - as per the passages I have quoted - imply that dungeon design, and the development of a campaign world around it, is driven by the needs of the campaign participants.
The closest thing I can find, in Gygax, to advice on designing a wilderness, is on p 47 of his DMG:
It is necessary to have a reasonably well-detailed, large scale map for conducting adventures outdoors. Naturally, the initial adventuring in the campaign will be those in the small community and nearby underground maze. For whatever reason - player desire, quest or geas, or because of your own direction - adventuring will sooner or later move to the outdoors.
That is neither a description of, nor advocacy for, world-exporation sandboxing. It explicity flags as a possible reason for wilderness adventuring
the GM's direction - much as the discussion of low-level dungeon adventuring assumes that the GM tells the players what dungeon to explore.
Marsh/Cook Expert, with it's example of the Grand Duchy of Karameikos, gives a better introduction to sandboxing than either of the other two sources I've mentioned. I don't know how popular that boxed set was compared to Moldvay or the AD&D books.
It may be true that you and everyone you knew who was playing in 1979 was playing world-exploration sandboxes. But I doubt that the hundreds of thousands of players who learned the game from Moldvay Basic and Gygax's DMG all, or even mostly, gravitated to the same playstyle in spite of the complete lack of advice on what it looks like, and how to do it. It seems to me more likely that they followed the advice provided by Moldvay and Gygax, and designed those parts of the world that were
needed for the campaign - where need is determined both by player desire and GM direction.
You're arguing something in this one quoted passage that no one else is arguing against but (because citations that support your arguments from this period are thin or overstated) and act as if the rules thence forth fully support modern storytelling conceits rather than being introduced over time as exceptions to standard gameplay (which everyone who has discussed it in this thread seems to agree come from how some GMs and players, including the designers who still played the game, might have played at their own game tables).
I understand that this paragraph is criticising me for something, but I don't understand the nature of the criticism.
No one (including me) has asserted that the AD&D rules "fully support modern storytelling conceits" - whatever exactly those are meant to be. What I am asserting in this particular sub-discussion is that parts of the AD&D rules, which I have quoted, advise the GM to have regard to the overall real-world dynamics of play - pacing, interest, excitement, etc - in managing content introduction. You see this on p 9 with regard to wandering monsters (one important form of content introduction in AD&D). You see this on p 110 with regard to secret door discovery (another important form of content introduction in AD&D, and indeed in any dungeon-exploration game). You see this on pp 86, 87 and 97 with regard to starting and developing a campaign, including the use of the concept "needs of the campaign participants". You see this on p 38 with respect to giving players whose PCs are out of sync with others in the time line dungeons to explore, even if the dice, or the GM's intitial plan for the campaign world, didn't envisage a dungeon there.
I am also asserting that the reason you see this advice is because there are tensions in RPG play - very well-known and much-discussed tensions - between imperatives of "world simulation" and letting the players only influence the content of the campaign via the ingame capabilities of their PCs, and imperatives of pleasurable game play. Many developments in RPG design over the 40 years the hobby has existed can be seen as responses, of various sorts, to these tensions.
Gygax himself, on p 38 of his DMG, illustrates a simple example: player A has his/her PC go off on a quest to speak to an oracle, which takes many ingame days, and hence ends up out-of-whack with the ingame timeline of the other PCs. What is the GM meant to do?
I think most contemporary RPGers would try and find a way to close the ingame time-gap. Some games even have deliberate design features to facilitate this, such as training rules which allow the players of the other PCs to quicly pass ingame time without getting no benefit at all for their PCs.
Gygax, who is working in a framework in which the GM is running sessions for multiple groups of players with, it seems, multiple sessions per week, makes a different suggestion: stick a new dungeon into the wilderness near the orcale for player A's PC to explore, so that player A can also keep playing in the campaign, although not in the same sessions as players B, C, D, E and F.
Another possible solution would be for player A to build a new PC to join the other players at the earlier point in the timeline (Gygax hints at this sort of possibility on p 7 of his PHB). I think the reason for Gygax describing his bonus dungeon option as a kinder one is that it lets player A continue to play PC A, incuding getting the benefits of PC A having travelled to the oracle and received supernatural lore.
Another option, canvassed by Gygax, is that the GM tells the players in the campaign "that there is a hiatus, which will necessitate only certain members of their number playing together, as their respective characters cannot locate the others of the separated groups." I think it's pretty obvious that for many play groups, perhaps most, this is hopelessly unsatisfactory, no matter how much it presereves the integrity of the GM-authored campaign world and the ingame timeline. Presmably in most groups the players want to actually turn up and play, not be told that they're barred from playing due to reasons of ingame timelines until the other players have played enough sessions to bring their PCs up to the same point of ingame time!
Here's where you go even further off the tracks and show your belief that your idea of fun is everyone's idea of fun, as you are identifying what you see as problematic then casting it as universally problematic.
On this I'm happy to nail my colours to the mast: I think the numer of players who think it is fun to be told "Don't botther turning up to this week's session, as your PC is too far ahead in the ingame timeline to participate in this session's events" is infintessimally small as a proportion of overall RPG players.
This is why Gygax canvasses other options. This is why games from early ones like Runequest, through to modern ones like Burning Wheel, have training rules, to allow players of other PCs to "catch up" within the game while still getting a PC-advancement benefit. It is also why many groups (including the OP in this thread, [MENTION=5143]Majoru Oakheart[/MENTION]) have very strict rules about party-play, about not splitting the party, about limiting sidequests, about sticking to the GM's adventure path, etc. Those metagame rules (or conventions, if you don't like the terminology of rules being applied to them) ensure that there will be no issues of timeline disparities of the sort that Gygax is talking about.
My contention is that in sandbox games PCs have a great variety of things to do and make their own determination as to what is challenging to them and what they might think wise to put off until they become more experienced adventurers.
This is true, but has bascially no bearing on anything I've posted. What you say here says nothing about the role and responsibilities of a GM in a sandbox campaign. What I am talking about, including with reference to Gygax's DMG (oten regarded as his magnum opus) is exactly those things - what a GM is expected to do, and to what extent the GM is expected to have regard to player hopes and expectations in doing those things.
In the particular passage I quoted, the issue arose because of timeline issues - player A is stranded in an "isolated" part of the timeline, and the GM has to decide whether or not to give that player something to do by introducing a hitherto unintended dungeon into the time and place of player A's PC.
Another example could come up if a group of PCs take their PCs into the desert looking for pyramids to loot, and instead - due to getting lost, perhaps, or due to wandering monsters - lose their camels and hence lose their ability to carry their food and water supplies. Should the GM just declare that the PCs die of thirst? Or is the GM permitted, even expected, to introduce some opportunity for the PCs to survive and for the players thereby to have a fun game - eg as the PCs are digging for water, they come across some buried stones that just happen to be the entrance to a hitherto unexplored underground tomb?
These are real issues of GMing technique around content-introduction. GMs need advice and examples. This is why Gygax gave some advice. (Though his advice isn't the be-all and end-all. But equally it's far from useless either.)
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Because of your own predilections, you take the idea of challenging the players as an ideal, as discreet and defined challenges for which there are specific solutions
I have no idea why you say this. Perhaps you have me confused with the OP? Upthread I have described specific solution pay as "sudoku solving". I think it has its time and place, but personally I don't think an RPG session is typically that time or place.
In my view it's the GM's job to come up with interesting and engaging challenges; it is the job of the players to work out solutions for resolving the challenges that confront their PCs, not the GM's job.
But the challenges the GM poses should
have feasible solutions within the general parameters of the game. If a dungeon is designed for 1st level PCs - something that both Gygax and Moldvay discuss - then I think it would be pretty pointless to put in significant features of the dungeon that can't be accessed or interacted with except via teleportation magic. Whereas putting interesting things on high ledges is a different matter - 1st level PCs can be expcted to climb, use ropes and grapples, etc to get to high places.
To shift back over to the player authorship discussion, how effective is a passage slanting downward into unknown depths if a player can simply put crates at the end and climb back up and out through the trapdoor that appeared at the player's authorial direction?
I have no idea what this hypothetical example is meant to relate to.
Upthread when the discussion about boxes in alleys first occurred I contrasted the artificially austere environment of a dungeon with the realities of an urban environment. If the GM has described an empty dungeon room, how are crates going to appear unless the PCs have the ability to conjure them (eg via a Minor Creation spell, a Robe of Useful Items, or some equivalent capability in a different fantasy RPG)?
The point about boxes in an alley is that, in an urban-based game, it is impossible to suppose that nothing exists except what the GM describes. Even allowing for the reduced economic capacity of faux-mediaeval compared to industrial societies, an urban environment in D&D will have far more stuff around than a GM can describe. If the GM describes an empty alley, that obviously means "empty of people". But does it mean "empty of rats"? Seems unlikely, unless the exterminators have just payed a visit or the wererats have just called them all away - rats are ubiquitous in urban environments. Does that mean "empty of filth and refuse"? That's fairly unlikely in a modern city with proper sewage and sanitation, and seems less likey for our faux-mediaeval alley. Does that mean "empty of junk"? In most cases the GM won't have turned his or her mind to what sort of junk might be lying around in an alley.
Part of the metagame utiity of a dungeon environment is that it
is so austere, and hence makes it feasible for the GM to present a somewhat total picture of the environment via simple narration to the players. For a city this is impossible, unless the city is unlike all the actual cities known to humanity, which have more stuff and people in them than a GM could hope to describe. That's the context in which it was suggested that a GM saying yes to a player query about boxes would be a GMing approach worth considering.
As to whether a trapdoor can appear at a player's authorial direction - I agree with other posters (eg [MENTION=69074]Cyberen[/MENTION]) that the difference between fate points and the use of a Robe of Useful Items or Nolzur's Marvellous Pigments to create a trapdoor is a matter of taste and flavour, but not any sort of fundamental difference of gameplay. If the players have so many fate points between them, and so they have to regulate their use to declare that they discover trap doors in the ceilings of rooms they are stuck in; or, if the players have so many pots of pigments or so many passwall scrolls, and hence have to regulate their use of them to create holes or trap doors in the ceilings of rooms they are stuck in; either way the players have the ability to escape from N rooms, but not from N+1, and managing those resources becomes part of the game.
Can the player justify that since he just killed ten healthy human guards they must have had crates of supplies and also a trapdoor through which to bring them into their guardroom? Does this early period of D&D allow for such authorship?
The player is certainly entitled to ask the GM is s/he sees any indication of what the guards were eating. If there are healthy guards in the dungeon, but no crates or bags or other containers holding food, no cisterns, etc, then the players might wonder what is going on. And if the GM hadn't turned his/her mind to the matter until a player asked the question, what should the GM do? Follow the player's lead, or insist that there is no food or water despite the evident well-being of the guards?
At what point in the development of D&D (leaving aside other RPGs and storytelling games for the time being) does such a scenario become the norm for D&D rather than unusual for gameplay?
The sort of player authorship you are describing - of unconstrained player introduction of ingame elements - has never been the norm in any version of D&D, except in narrowly confined contexts (eg the paladin's warhorse, or the Streetwise ability in 4e that allows knocking over barrels, haybales etc to create difficult terrain). Given the degree of unconstrainedness that you are insisting upon, I'm not sure that it's an element in many remotely mainstream RPGs.
But I also don't see what bearing it's presence or absence has on the question of the role that player's expressions of hope or expectation should have on the GM's authorship decisions.
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You need to understand that "wandering" monsters are one conceit that creatures do indeed make forays out of their rooms.
The only indication in Gygax's DMG that this is so is the sample wandering monster table for the sample dungeon, on p 94 - though it also has entries for monsters (namely, giant rats) that are not tagged to an area. Furthermore, there is no suggestion that killing wanderers will deplete the numbers in the rooms when those rooms are subsequently entered by the PCs.
The general discussion of wandering monsters, both in Gygax and in Moldvay, does not imply that wandering monsters come from particular dungeon rooms. For instance, there is no table that tells you the % chance that a GM should ignore his/her room key because the monsters are out wandering, and all the advice in Gygax's PHB about planning expeditions, and about how to interact with placed monsters, assumes that the distinction between placed and wandering monsters is a relatively clear-cut one.
In the fiction, we can imagine that the monsters wander from time-to-time but just so happen always to be home when the PCs turn up; or we can even imagine that some unguarded treasure is in fact in the lair of a wandering monster (which will be away from home whenever the PCs turn up). But the fact that this possible fiction is all read of real-world, play-based distinctions between rooms with occupants and rooms without, and treasures that are guarded and treasures that are not, to my mind just reinforces the unhelpfulness of trying to analyse the realities of play from the ingame perspective.
The only discussion, in Gygax's DMG, of a monster being absent from its lair, is in the section on time (p 37), and it is somewhat curious:
[The campaign has been running for] 50 days . . . At this point in time two new players [E and F] join the game . . . So on Day 51 . . . E and F enter the dungeon . . . rest a couple of game days and return for another try on Day 54 - where they stumble upon the worst monster on the first level, surprise it, and manage to slay it and come back with a handsome treasure. You pack it in for the night. . . . Four actual days later (and it is best to use 1 actual day = 1 game day when no play is happening), on Day 55, player characters B, C, and D enter the dungeon and find that the area they selected has already been cleaned out by player characters E and F. Had they come the day after the previous game session, game Day 52, and done the same thing, they would have found the monster and possibly gotten the goodies! . . .
Despite time differences, the activities of the newcomers to the campaign should be alowed to stand, as Destiny has decreed that the monster in question could not fall to the characters B, C, and D. Therefore, the creatur was obviously elsewhere (not dead) when they visited the lair on Day 52, but it had returned on Day 56 [I think this is a typo for 55].
Gygax here suggest retconning in the monster's absence from its lair as a way of explaining why PCs B, C and D, who in the fiction are acting earlier in time than E and F, can't kill and loot the monster that E and F killed at a time later in the fiction but earlier in the real world.
But what he doesn't explain is why the monster, in going wanderig on Day 52, also took all its treasure with it!
Gygax says, immediately folowing the passage I've quoted, "Being aware of time differences between groups of player characters will enable you to prevent the BIG problesm" but when I first read this section of the DMG 30-odd years ago I remember finding it almost impenetrable. Even in 1979 my guess would be that in most campaigns all the PCs were on a common clock, precisely to avoid the need for headache-inducing retcons of the sort that Gygax describes.
But in any event, this reinforces to me that wandering/placed is a fairly fundamental metagame status. Nothing suggests that, in the ordinary course and absent compelling reasons such as the time-management ones that Gygax describes, a GM should declare a room empty despite what is written on his/her key because the placed monster is in fact out having a wander.
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on page five of the (O)D&D's third booklet in the sample underworld the third entry states, "This area simply illustrates the use of slanting passages to help prevent players from accurately mapping a level." There's no guarantee that players and their PCs will know they are out of their depth.
Most of the GM advice I am familiar with for running that sort of dungeon - both from Gygax, and even moreso from Lewis Pulsipher writing in early White Dwarf - emphasises the importance of players having the chance to acquire information: by making checks (if they're dwarves or gnomes); by using divination spells and items; etc. If there is no way for the players to learn that they're on a deeper level, the element of skill has been eleminated and the game is tending towards lottery. The general tenor of Gygax's advice in his DMG and PHB is againt this.
if the slope is gentle even dwarves won't recognize it.
If the slope is a drop of (say) 1 inch every yard (around 1.6 degrees), that is likely to be observable upon serious visual inspection by anyone (not just a dwarf) and will almost certainly be detectable with marbles or poured fluids. Assuming that the separation between dungeon levels is around 30', that is 360 yards of sloping passage to drop one dungeon level.
Even if the players don't notice the slope, the sheer distance travelled along a single corridor should provide some sort of clue that something funny is up.
Room "E" is a transporter, two ways, to just about anywhere the referee likes, including the center of the earth or the moon. The passage south containing "F"is a one-way transporter, and the poor dupes will never realize it unless a very large party (over 50' in length) is entering it. (This is sure-fire fits for map makers among participants.)"
My understanding of teleporters is that good mapping is meant to be the key to identifying that the group has been teleported.
I also think that designing a dungeon for 1st level characters in which, of two otherwise indistinguishable doors, one teleported the characters to the 10th level, would be poor design. It makes the play of the game essentially arbitrary.
I think the point here is that the players can often have no idea they are even out of their depth, and far deeper in a dungeon than they know.
This is true, but I'm not sure what you think follows from it. The point is that, if they played well, using their various resources (of race, class, magic, equipment, mapping etc) then they
could know, or learn - and this is part of the skill involved in playing the game.
If a situation is set up so that they
cannot know - for instance a teleport room that is immune to detect magic, in a dungeon where "magnetic forces" make it impossible for a gnome to determine depth underground - then I think the dungeon design has departed from the norms that Gygax advocates in his AD&D books. It has become, in effect, a lottery - anyone who is unlucky enough to enter the teleport room can't avoid or correct for that fate.
(The green devil in ToH is not arbitrary in this particular fashion - eg you can stick a pole into it and notice that it is a disintegrator/teleporter.)
