pemerton said:
Here's just one excerpt, from p 87 of Gygax's DMG, under the heading "Setting things in motion":
Set up the hamlet or village where the action will commence with the player characters entering and interacting with the local population. . . . When they arrive, you will be ready to take on the persona of the settlement as a whole, as well as that of each individual therein. . . . The players will quickly learn who is who and what is going on - perhaps at the loss of a few coins. Having handled this, their characters will be equipped as well as circumstances will allow and will be ready for their bold journey into the dangerous place where treasure abounds and monsters lurk.
To me, this makes it pretty clear that what sets things into motion is the arrival of the PCs. The players drive the action (though in this case by interacting with the elements of the GM's sandbox, rather than by the GM framing them into situations that engage their PCs beliefs/goals/aspirations etc).
Yes, but what is set in motion by their arrival was pre-determined by the DM who "Set up the hamlet or village where the action will commence...". Part of that set up is determining the NPC motivations, plots, secrets, etc., virtually all of which will be unknown to the players/PCs before they arrive. Many of those things may never be discovered, yet still have influence on the PCs.
It seems to me that the
what which is set in motion is something like the Village of Hommlet (not to be confused with the Hamlet of Viloge, I guess) described by Gygax in T1.
If you have a read of T1, you will see that the village has a "persona" as well as individuals with their personae; but it is not going to move on its own. Without the PCs it is a largely static situation - there are spies for Verbobonc, spies for the Temple of Elemental Evil, prospective henchmen and hirelings, etc - but there is nothing written in the situation about how it will change in the absence of the PCs.
This is quite different from a situation in which NPCs have their own character arcs (as [MENTION=37579]Jester David[/MENTION] said and [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] seemed to agree with). And it's quite different from a situation in which the world is in motion on its own, and will change fundamentally in the absence of actions by the PCs. Unsurprisingly, though, it's fairly similar to the Keep in B2.
In literary/film terms, the logic of T1 seems to be similar to that of many Vance stories, some westerns, some Arthurian-type stories of wandering knights - the situation is static but contains within it the seeds of its own evolution (or destruction), but is waiting for some outsiders who will enter into the situation and upset things.
And that's why I don't think these examples, or Gygax's advice in his DMG on how to create them, are consistent with the claim that traditional D&D is fundamentally GM-driven. To reiterate: these Gygaxian starting settings will not enter into motion on their own. They have no inherent or self-moving "plots". I've never use Hommlet, but the same properties of B2 mean that
I've been able to use it more than once as a backdrop for the sort of game I GM, simply by adding in a few embellishments that link some of the pivotal characters (eg the priest of chaos, the castellan, etc) into the concerns of the PCs and their established trajectory of play.
Whereas Speaker in Dreams (to pick another example of a published module about an urban setting) is quite different. It does have its own internal dynamic; it is in motion independently of the PCs. And that's why I've never used Speaker in Dreams as such, but have only taken bits and pieces out of it (eg the cultists) to repurpose for my game.
EDITED to include reply to [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]:
This is one option
<snip>
The other primary (and I think more traditional) option is the DM drives the action by making it clear there's an adventure out there that needs doing.
We agree that there are different approaches here.
But on the issue of "tradition": I think that Gygax is a pretty authoritative articulator of theD&D tradition! And the sort of set-up he talks about is found not only in published modules like T1 and B2 but also fits with accounts of dungon and world design that I'm familiar with in the magazines from aroudn the same time (late 70s/early 80s).
That's not to deny that the GM-driven adventure also exists from an early stage in the hobby. But I don't think that it has any sort of exclusive claim on "tradition". And I would say it's not until the mid-to-late 80s that it becomes near-universal.