OSR What's the best introductory BX/OSR scenario for new players and DMs?

[Voadam]

Which is weird and funny considering that Gary went into some detail on it in the 1979 DMG. You'd think that advice would have been incorporated into TSR published designs, as a rule rather than as an exception.

Although perhaps part of the issue is that after about '81 or '82 TSR may have been aware that their primary buying demographic was trending younger and younger. More and more middle school-aged boys, fewer of the college students and adult wargamers who made up most of the market in the '70s. In that context, simple "the monsters attack!" encounters make more sense, for kid gamers to run.

Yeah, the 1e DMG is for advanced while most of the intro modules are in the B series for basic. But even B2 is set up for possible faction play with multiple different groups of humanoids. I don't remember a lot of advice in B2 but it seems inherent in the setup. Also B/X has the whole reaction roll thing going on so that hostilities are often possible but not a default always thing RAW. Mostly that was left up to the DM to free form though is my recollection of it.

I remember some discussion of factions and responses in the AD&D Temple of Elemental Evil and I certainly ran it that way in the 80s as young teen as the AD&D party I was running moved on from starting in B1 to multiple assaults on the Moathouse and the New Master.

AD&D had a bunch of competition modules that set things up to be fairly linear and static to provide similar challenges to wide varieties of groups running under different DMs at a tournament and allow judging and competitive ranking based on module performance.

 

[Gus L]

Which is weird and funny considering that Gary went into some detail on it in the 1979 DMG. You'd think that advice would have been incorporated into TSR published designs, as a rule rather than as an exception.

Although perhaps part of the issue is that after about '81 or '82 TSR may have been aware that their primary buying demographic was trending younger and younger. More and more middle school-aged boys, fewer of the college students and adult wargamers who made up most of the market in the '70s. In that context, simple "the monsters attack!" encounters make more sense, for kid gamers to run.

Yes, it's precisely that B5 is a post 80's TSR product.

I don't think AD&D does much better given the general disorganization, though as you say there are some good passages in the DMG about running less linear games. Unfortunately the circumstances of AD&D's production (as a collection of accreted table rules, bundled together and given to editors to get out quick at least partially as part of a litigation strategy by Gygax) don't help, and the adventures produced for it vary widely in both style and design.

For sure though by the mid-1980's (and B5 is on the cusp of this) one sees the more "Trad" style of adventure design taking over - the design style often associated with the Hickmans (though to be fair to them they manage to write far better adventures then most of their emulators) - that relies on rather linear narratives and forced moral decisions. The whys and hows of this happening are interesting, but I think that places like r/OSR seemingly heading down the same path now (at least as far as praising things like B11 indicates) are an interesting eternal reoccurrence style event. Perhaps in 2051 we'll be seeing the emergence of the OSRR (Old School Renaissance Revival) where folks on forums are excited about rediscovering Sleeping Place of the Feathered Swine and Anomalous Subsurface Environment.*

*This is unlikely as Google will undoubtedly scrub blogger from existence as soon as it finishes using all of our blog posts as AI corpus.