Heroic tales and myths often have scenes like this and, inspired by those, I'm confident DMs have been doing the very same for decades before 4e came along.
I don't think that's in dispute. But I can run the "liberate the land from the dragon tyrant" scenario in RuneQuest, too. That doesn't necessarily mean that RQ is well-suited to giving me what I'm looking for. In fact, classic RQ has certain features that will make it hard to run a heroic fantasy game (in particular, the grittiness of its combat). For the same sort of reason, Classic Traveller doesn't do Star Wars very well, although you could try it if you wanted to.
B/X doesn't suffer from gritty combat too badly (at least once you get to 3rd level). But it has other featurse - the XP system, the exploration mechanics, the time keeping rules, etc - which in my experience are impediments to running the sort of scenario I'm talking about.
Nor does 1e actively discourage it. The 1e DMG describes placement of treasure as rewards from the perspective of loot primarily, yes, but the important theme of that text is that magic placement should be logical and should be taken with care and that awards should feel earned and not cheap. I would argue that handing out the Sword of Kas to a 1st level adventurer about to enter the Caves of Chaos isn't appropriate care but having a mentor or other mysterious NPC give the PCs the magical gewgaw needed to fulfill the quest, even if powerful, is doing so.
Nowhere does the text canvass that magic items might be handed out by friendly NPCs. Every bit of text actually pushes the other way: NPC MUs won't share spell books, even if they're ultra-loyal henchmen; items must be earned; think very carefully about placing any treasure, let alone magic treasure, unguarded by any monster or trap; etc.
The first express discussion I'm familiar with, in a D&D book, of using friends and mentors rather than enemy or dungeon loot as a source of items, is in the 3E Oriental Adventures book.
AD&D was so chock full of flavorful characters, items, spells, etc. that you were encouraged as a DM to explore them. And I think you are correct that 1E doesn't actively discourage you from doing so.
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On the other hand, there are a lot of indirect pieces, especially the nature of the system itself, that do end up discouraging you after awhile
When I think about the discussion of treasure placement in Moldvay Basic and Gygax's AD&D, there is no canvassing at all that a PC might be gifted a powerful magic item by a mysterious hermit. The entire text is framed around the assumption that magic is a powerful reward, which has to be balanced against the risks of obtaining it. Recovering a lost magic item is one of the sample Moldvay scenarios, from memory - and there is no implication that this will be a social, as opposed to an operational, challenge.
The same vibe is present in the unofficial texts from the same period (eg Lewis Pulsipher's stuff in White Dwarf).
And if you want to do it as a social challenge, where is the system support? And how much treasure is appropriate? I'm not saying it can't be done - as I said, you can do Star Wars in Traveller if you really want to. But you're pushing against the text and the rules to do so.
4E has the opposite problem. The system is pushing and screaming at you to have a direct, rollicking game. But then a lot of the material it gives you is rather bland, which means the DM job is to pick out the good stuff and/or bring his own good stuff from outside the game. This is an indirect drag. (4E is hurt here by bloat. Edited down to 25% to 50% of its best, the good stuff would be easier to find.)
I don't disagree with that at all!
I would argue there's a difference between setting up the Dragon Tyrant as an antagonist because killing him drives the story, and setting him as an obstacle to prevent the characters from gaining gold and experience.
The result might be the same, but I think making the opponent the focus versus the reward as the focus changes the game's feel.
Definitely. And it then also goes to how the gameplay unfolds. In a loot focused game of the AD&D variety, having enough sacks and backpacks is a big part of play. I mean, have a look at the example in Appendix O of the DMG: they find loot, and they have to empty their pockets of rations and fill their sacks and backpacks. And the rules text emphasises this operational issue of how much loot weights, how the PCs are going to carry it out, etc, etc.
That stuff adds nothing to a scenario about liberating the lands from the dragon tyrant.
"Thematic play" is essentially meaningless without a qualification of what the campaign's themes are. If one of the themes is that the world is a dangerous place and trouble could lurk around any corner, then the wandering monster makes great sense. That may be grittier than your preferred view of a campaign's themes, but plenty of players seem to like it.
"Thematic play" in the sense I'm using it isn't that meaningless. Yes, in some sense every text has a theme. But in another familiar sense, Graham Greene's books have thematic content while airport thrillers don't.
Here is an expression of the contrast in mechanical terms:
Concrete example . . . Simulationism over-riding Narrativism
A weapon does precisely the same damage range regardless of the emotional relationship between wielder and target. (True for RuneQuest, not true for Hero Wars)
This argument still seems weird to me... it's sort of like me taking the fact that one of the tenets expressed about the 4e world in the DMG is that "monsters are everywhere"... and then claiming 4e doesn't support this very well because there are no tables for wandering monsters in the corebook and it actively encourages longer set piece battles... as opposed to more numerous smaller battles.
Is this basically similar to the argument you're making?
I don't know. Have you had trouble running a "monsters are everywhere" game using 4e? I haven't, but I'm not you. (I use other techniques than wandering monster tables to run my "monsters are everywhere" game.)
I have had trouble running epic, thematic games in classic D&D. The rules don't support it. And in fact they actively get in the way.
It also appears to me that the argument was about what the system rewarded and thus framed around xp. That seems to assume the driving force is still xp, regardless of story.
There is a game that tries to keep classic D&D mechanics intact, while using "story" to drive the game. It is called 2nd ed AD&D. I have pretty much the orthodox Forge view of that system: I want the mechanics to serve my goals in play, not push against them.
the focus will be what your players decide their character's motivation is, correct? Why can the Dragon Tyrant only be one or the other? Can't he be an obstacle for some players and an "antagonist" for others?
Some players want to heroically defeat the Dragon Tyrant and free the land, and for those players the focus is the death of the Dragon Tyrant... on the other hand some players will want to loot the treasure vaults of the Dragon Tyrant and for them their focus will be on looting the vaults... through the death of the Dragon Tyrant. These just seem to be more questions of player motivation than of the DM imposing some arbitrary categorization on the Dragon Tyrant or dictating what their motivations should be.
There are two ways of interpreting what you describe here.
One is at the RPG scenario level: some PCs are heroes, other mercenaries (Star Wars is a well-known example; the Seven Samurai is another). If I wanted to run that scenario , it strikes me as obvious that Burning Wheel would do a better job, because it would both support the competing PC motivations and bring them into conflict in an interesting and mechanically mediated way. (I'm sure there are other systems, too, that could do as good a job as Burning Wheel.)
But if you are talking at the actual table level - some players want to play a heroic game, others want to play an operational mercenary game - then I can already feel the balance of power issues, and I'm not even sitting down to play yet! If I run this group using classic D&D rules and GM them Gygax's way, then the heroic players will, I think, have the game pushing against them at nearly every turn. If, instead, I GM it the 2nd ed way, then I will have to use a lot of GM force to suspend and manipulate the action resolution mechanics (and perhaps other aspects of the mechanis as well). The operational players won't get what they're looking for. The heroic players may or may not, depending how important protagonism is to them. Neither is an experiment I particularly care to carry out in practice!
Anyway, when I talk about an epic, thematic game, I'm not talking about PC motivations - one of the more memorable PCs that I GMed was a self-loathing traitor to his city and beliefs, who died (multiple times - it was a gonzo-fantasy game with ressurection available) as a consequence of his drug addiction, and at the hands of the demon's summoned by his evil wizard "friend" and overlord. I'm talking about what I and the players are getting out of the game.
I am trying to see where worldbuilding or camapign setting vs. game rules comes into play here?
I'm talking about rules, not setting. Action resolution rules. Character build rules. Treasure placement rules. Pacing rules (which in classic D&d mostly involves timekeeping). Which is a good chunk of the overall suite of classic D&D rules.
In other words the tools to support and reward this type of play were there, you just had to use them
Tell me what they were. You mentioned the 4e DarkSun book - ie you're pointing at a book. Tell me what the classic D&D book was that I missed (other than Oriental Adventures, which I've already mentioned).
