Jester David
Hero
It's almost as if the conventions and assumptions of the game have changed and evolved over the almost forty years since those adventures were published.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.
It's almost as if Gygax - with his six or seven years of experience creating adventures and DMing - might not have been as adept at adventure design as someone now who might have two or three decades of continual experience running the game and writing adventures and building on the collective adventure design advances made by dozens of official adventure writers and designers.
I respect EGG a lot for his contributions to the hobby. But he was making it up as he went along. I don't think we should be beholden to his ideas of adventure design in 1979 any more than we should be restricted to his ideas of racial or class balance, or required to abide by his worldbuilding tropes.
Gygax makes a lot of claims for gameplay in 1e that we often conveniently ignore. Like the importance of having players map dungeons. Acquiring hirelings and gaining a keep. Name levels. Alignment languages. Tracking game time being "of the utmost importance".
The thing is, Gygax was continually changing how he wrote adventures. The "D&D tradition" changed dramatically between OD&D and 1e, between Against the Giants to Temple of Elemental Evil. Every year brought new changes and advancements to how he designed adventures. Let alone the stuff he was doing after he left TSR.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).
You can look at a single small sampling of his stuff at the very beginning of his career and say that's definitive. It's like looking at ET, Close Encounters, and Jaws and using that to define the career of Steven Spielberg and how movies should be made.
Grognardia puts the blame at Dragonlance.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.
So it's *only* existed for 3/4ths of the lifespan of the hobby.
Judging by published products of course. There's no guarantee people weren't creating their own vast GM plots far earlier.
But if you're actually curious, books have been written on this:
https://www.amazon.ca/Creation-Narrative-Tabletop-Role-Playing-Games/dp/0786444517