Sorry about the misunderstanding. As for KotB, I absolutely agree about the logical inconsistencies, but I don't really understand what you mean when you say KotB doesn't support "divergence in a story," or player proaction, or that it's "the exact opposite of" a sandbox. Can you explain? It seems pretty open to me. The PCs can even rally the humanoids and attack the Keep if they want to (that's where all the good treasure is, anyway).
I'm not saying it's a good sandbox because of those aspects, but rather that it's a good introductory module because of those aspects. I do agree that if you're a DM who's been around the block, and your players have been around the block, then KotB isn't really useful.
It's more like I'm a new kid who's really excited about the lawn, and you're really bored with the lawn because you've been looking at it for so long, and I'm defending the fact that a lawn can be fun even when it's just a lawn. This isn't a great metaphor, and it's ironic that I'm more interested in what I consider the old-school style because it's new to me (after getting bored with a long "modern" campaign with lots of "story"). What I'm trying to say here is that we're at such different places in our gaming careers that something that's fun or worthwhile to me isn't necessarily going to be fun or worthwhile to you--though I think there's a large middle ground, and I'd love to play with you and experience how you run things, since I don't really understand what you mean just by reading it on the forum, and I'm still exploring my style.
I apologize if I've been anything less than civil, and I hope you will extend the same courtesy to me.
Well and fairly spoken. I'll try to be less quick to draw weapons.
Sure, you can ransack the keep. The DM I considered my mentor told me that as a player, his group had done basically exactly that - robbed the keep blind and fled with its treasure. But if you go that way, the module isn't really any help in that regard. There is only the barest notes on how to run that, as there are in the Caves of Chaos describing when and from where reinforcements arrive if conflict breaks out. There is very little in the way of intrigue in the keep and the whole description of the thing is over in 4 pages. If this becomes the focus of the adventure, it's again on the strength of the DM to improvise and quite frankly, from the way Gygax wrote the section it appears his intent in play is that if the PCs are so stupid as to commit a crime in the Keep then the DM should quickly squash them. The fact that they probably could do so makes any tension about the Caves of Chaos rather unimportant, since again, it's a total mismatch of forces.
The Keep, the Caves, and their environments constitute a classic 'small world' - which the text actually admits. A small world is a cleverly designed sort of railroad in which you present the world as being open, but in fact the world contains only 1 or a few things of interest, and the thing you are intended to do is brightly labeled with big neon signs saying, "Treasure this way." If a Small World is designed well enough, the players never realize that they are in one or question it. If you give a small world to a novice DM, they'll be perfectly fine so long as the players follow the brightly outlined road, but the small world will be of no help explaining what else is there to do. For example, there is a Guild House for passing merchants and detailed accounting of the taxes that they pay... but no examples of travelling merchants, and no explanation of where they are coming from and going, and no way of finding any of these things out. They don't actually exist in the small world. This is it. You have the Caves of Chaos. Hang out in the small world until you get bored and do what you are supposed to do. Why do it? Because its the only thing to do, that's why.
The text actually is smart enough to know this is true about itself, which is why it tells the novice DM, "In fact, before they have finished all the adventure areas of this module, it is likely you will have to add your own separate maps to the setting... You must build the towns and terrain which surround it. You must shape the societies, create the kingdoms, and populate the countryside with men and monsters." Basically Gygax is saying, "Guess what. Get started, but you need to put in hours of work on your own before this is really going to work well." When I first encountered this module as a kid, I had no ability to do that well. The text tells the would be DM to first draw floor plans for all the buildings in the Keep! I hadn't a clue how to do that much less create a network of villages and other encounter around the Keep, and so forth. Yet, I wonder, just whether other DMs figured that out as quickly and competently as Gygax was assuming. I get the impression Gygax's notion that the DM will rapidly grow the setting and the caves and environs and flesh out everything isn't necessarily the usual way that KotB is run. I think modern adventure designers have realized that the general competence that Gygax was assuming just doesn't exist, or certainly doesn't exist without far greater cultivation than the early modules were providing.
As for Adamantium Walls, one of the purposes of a dungeon setting is to constrain choice down to a small set of easily resolved propositions in answer to questions that the DM poses explicitly or implicitly. "Do you go left or right?", for example. But whether you go left or right is not a meaningful choice. Sure, the choice may have a different outcome and different events may proceed from that, but its in general not an informed choice. It's more or less a random walk. In a dungeon, you have to go left or right though. The walls are solid. You don't have a choice but to pick from the a few choices available to you, which lets you right nice tight little modules where you can provide all the possible answers to a novice DM - or at least, near enough. But B2 actually has an even stronger example of the Adamantium Walls technique. The module advices: "If the party attempts to move off the map, have a sign, a wandering stranger, a friendly talking magpie, or some other "helper" tell them that they are moving in the wrong direction." This isn't empty advice. I had to do exactly that. But I had absolutely no idea what to do then if the players had wanted to ignore the friendly helper. I had a friend tell me that the first time he'd been run on the module, the DM had actually caused them to bump into a force field at the map edge because he was afraid of what would happen if they left the map. A true Small World indeed!
These techniques give the illusion of a sandbox, but they aren't one. Gygax actually knew that, he just didn't have the space in the text to show you what you needed to do to have one. But one thing he does that I think is a mistake is to give no one in the text a name despite the small amount of text that would have taken compared with or instead of giving titles. This is a huge oversight in my opinion, however well intentioned it may have been. The problem with given nothing a name is that a name tells the novice player that the thing is a actually a person. Anything that isn't named is faceless and mere statistics. Gygax I think assumes that DMs will be able to invent any number of names as suits them on the spot, and probably assumed any DM preparing to run the module would just go ahead and invent a name for all the major NPCs before hand. I general, I doubt either is true - the sheer number of name generators out there and my own experience indicates that naming NPCs is as hard as it important. I'm barely able to manage now after doing this for 30 years.
In short, running KotB "right" - even up to the standards Gygax envisioned - requires a massive amount of creativity and work right out of the package. But to run it up to my standards where the setting actually makes some sense when you think about it and offers truly fun and varied gameplay and approaches, requires not only that but massive rethinking of the scenario. That's why I said that it would be harder IMO to run than either ToEE or I6: Ravenloft.
I'm just in the mood to design some interesting chambers and see people react. Also I know nothing about Mages and Monsters.
