Let me try and answer the question, but in so doing, I don't want to sound like I'm calling anyone's way of playing D&D "badwrongfun." Just a quick edit too: the ways I describe playing D&D are not intended in any way to be the only ways it was played.
Back in the day, as they say, there was a school of playing D&D that largely came out of its roots as a wargame. In this type of game, you didn't bother coming up with anything but a token name for your character, rolled your stats 3D6 in order, and rolled your hit points ... and you were just about ready to go. Characters were created on a 3x5 card, and maybe, if they survived for a few levels (which was very unlikely: you would come to play with 10-12 characters for a session!) you might upgrade them to an actual piece of paper.
So you might have your fighter with 3 Hit points, who's best stat was his constitution of 12, and he wore scale mail and used a trident, and he would go into an adventure seeking fortune and glory. The only heroics that occurred were when the dice happened to fall your way and you actually made it through enough encounters to find your token +1 dagger or similar minor magic trinket. It was what I'd call "nasty, brutish and short," or NBS play. No one cared about the character death, in fact many times a good death was actually cheered on.
After a while, that play style begat a new one, where it was decided that characters would do everything they could in order to survive these situations, which made them get their 10' poles, prod every square, search every heap of dung, and do everything in their power to avoid any fight where they didn't have an ambush or other special advantage set up for them. I think this is the style of play that Merric is talking about: an evening would entail searching a very small area, hoping to find that special advantage or secret door that would give the group the needed benefit to make the fight against the orcs that much easier. I'll call that play "By Hook or By Crook" or BHoBC.
I played in a couple of NBS campaigns when I was very young. I didn't enjoy them very much because everything was so random and a good or bad die roll could make or break a character. It seemed like you were never progressing towards anything interesting, always seeing the same sorts of challenges over and over again. The campaign also tended to end if one character reached third or fourth level, since new characters were level one, and couldn't really contribute as much at that point.
When I was about 11 or 12 I played an entire summer's campaign in the BHoBC style. At the end of the summer we had finally cleared out the caves of chaos, and our characters were ready to move onto greener pastures. That was playing 3-4 times a week, all day for an entire summer. I had this sense of accomplishment at last.
Honestly, the pacing of that kind of a game wore me down, and it was soon after that when I discovered Champions and other game systems, and largely left AD&D behind. To get an idea of what we did: once we heard about the existance of the ogre in the caves (a famous monster, to be sure!) we ended up setting up a snare trap in front of a set of caltrops and broken glass, and then used greek fire to burn the thing alive. No one ever stepped in and actually battled it hand to hand. That was a heroic effort, I'll tell you! In that particular session we had an entire game spent scouting out the location of the ogre, and about half of one setting up the traps and provisioning the greek fire.
Today, I could never see playing in either of those campaign styles, frankly: I don't have nearly the time, or the patience to spend on a BHoBC game, and I want someone to identify with an play as a hero, which pretty much rules out the NBS games. After about 20 minutes of working to acquire provisions my eyes start to glaze over, and I can't imagine coming up with half a dozen character ideas in one game session.
I know there are a fair number of EnWorlders who do enjoy playing such things today, however, and I say more power to them...even if I can really no longer understand that style of play. For me, I am simply glad that there are other options out there now, including the new D&D.
--Steve
