That's because you can't run Shadowdark with Shadowdark alone. You need additional books to teach best practices. You need to read things like the Old School Primer, Principia Apocrypha.
Using the rules in the game, it's TPK after TPK. Using the adventures as written by Arcane Library, it's TPK after TPK. You have to house rule ... a lot.
You absolutely do not. Scribe and others have pointed out repeatedly in this thread that the GM advice you're asking for is literally in the GM book. Veldaren and Whizbang Dustyboots mentioned on page 2 of the thread that by the book Reaction rules there is less than a 50% chance of an encounter being immediately hostile.
Why do you keep making this false assertion?
That's undoubtedly part of SD's success- that Kelsey distilled that OSR DM advice so people don't have to reference the Principia and other sources. If none of the DMs you played with followed that advice or ran the game in accordance with the principles she lays out, that's fundamentally on them. I'm sorry you had three of them.
Regarding the spell failure, I attest that it's still too high. At 1st level, with an average wizard character with a 14 Int, you still have like a 45% fail rate.
This is a demonstrably false statement, and it's been made after the rules were already quoted showing its falsity, which is blowing my mind.
With a first level wizard character with a 14 Int, you have a 40% fail chance with a tier 1 spell (rolls of 1-8 on the d20) IF you choose not to play an elf or human
and not counting your Talent roll(s).
If you're an elf you undoubtedly take +1 to casting rolls, so your failure chance is 35% BEFORE your first level Talent roll. Nearly twice as likely to succeed as to fail. At first level. And that Talent increases your casting roll by another +1 (either directly or by increasing your Int) or it gives you Advantage on one of your spells 30/36 times. 1/36 it gives you free magic item. 5/36 it gives you another spell.
If you're a human you get two Talent rolls at 1st level. So the most likely case for either a human or elf 1st level Wizard with a 14 Int is you have a 70% cast chance (21/36 talent rolls add +1 to cast), and if you don't, you almost certainly have 65% as well as Advantage on at least one spell (probably two if you took Magic Missile).
When in the other games it was modelled upon, you had a 0% fail rate to cast many spells. Even the ones that allowed saving throws, many enemies had like a 15% chance to save.
These are both objectively false statements, and they're both being made right after I quoted the actual numbers from B/X.
Of the low level TSR D&D offensive spells, only Magic Missile and Sleep denied saves. And even the lowest level enemies* have a 25% chance to save- a 16 Save vs Spells. 25% chance of your one spell failing compared with less than 40% of each of your three spells failing = in aggregate, a SD 1st level Wizard does more on an average day, has LOWER odds of none of his spells working, than a 1st level TSR MU. Unless you take Sleep, of course (though Sleep doesn't work against undead, and there's strong odds you hold it in reserve and don't use it unless you run into a particularly dangerous encounter). Magic Missile is guaranteed to do
something, but you can also roll badly on damage and fail to kill a kill a single orc. The 25% chance of an Orc making its save against Charm Person is smaller than the 33% chance that you roll a 1 or 2 for damage with MM and do 2-3 points.
*(Edit: Correction. A Goblin or Kobold only saves as Normal Man, not Fighter 1, so it only has a 15% chance to save (18). Mea culpa. An Orc or Hobgoblin gets the 16.)
