Re: What difficultly level do you play one?

On 13/07/2024 16:43, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

There really is almost nothing in the official written material that
pushed forward that's how the game was supposed to be played.

A few hints are scatted in the official rulebooks that the world
should be reactive (DMG 1E p104, for instance) but I agree, actual
recommendations on the matter were fairly scarce. Then again, actual
advice on how to play the game/in general/  wasn't that common either;
almost the entire focus of those original rulebooks was on
dice-rolling rather than the more ephermeral roleplaying. Still, There
was a lot of stuff written in The Dragon Magazine with suggestions
along these lines, although how 'official' you may consider that is up
to debate. But if you read on how Gygax played his own campaigns, you
do see that he didn't run adventures where everything was static and
dependent on player actions.

That lack of clear language was a result of a blindness on the part of

Gygax and TSR; a failure to see that such obvious (to them)
instruction was required. They slowly started adding in clearer
instructions piecemeal, scattered across various books (the
Dungeoneers / Wilderness Survival Guides, Dungeon Masters Design Kit,
and with examples with later 1st Ed adventure modules and campaign
settings where there was more focus on how NPCs and monsters would
react to player actions. But it wasn't until 2nd Edition that TSR
would formalize the idea, in books like DMGR1 Campaign & Catacomb
Guide and DMGR5 Creative Campaigning, which were purposefully written
to aid DMs in creating more robust campaigns and pulling the game out
of the dungeon-crawl.
 

That's the problem I have, if that really was what they thought then you'd think when they introduced the game someone would have said, this style of gameplay is going to be entirely alien to many people so we need to provide guidance on how to get the most out of it. That's especially true when you consider how many players are only going to get the information from TSR products. So you mention Dragon magazine, that was available in the UK (I bought a few copies) but only in specialised stores. The one you could get in the local newsagents was White Dwarf and that had already moved to being focused on GW products.
Saying that we did get more into the roleplaying side when we started WHFRP. That wasn't really anything to do with official guidance but instead the pre-written modules leaned that way. When we started it was more a case of with fancy a change of system.