I was in junior high in the 1970s, and I got introduced to AD&D, not basic, although friends of friends sometimes had basic modules. In our little corner of the world it was hard to lay hands on modules, so we didn't have much to model off of. The first one I was unfortunate enough to pick up was Tomb of Horrors. Even reading through it I saw that wasn't really what I wanted to play. I remember going to an overnight with two friends who wanted me to DM and they had Isle of Dread and Village of H. The village one looked pretty boring, but flipping through Isle of Dread was incredibly confusing. How was I supposed to flip through that and simply start running it?
As a kid, unless you were in a larger city, how were you to have access to products that showcased a good dungeon design or even campaign design? I rarely had access to modules and most of them weren't very conducive to starting a campaign -- and there wasn't much advice on how to do that anyway. Maybe that's why so many modules are so bad.
Bryce's principles about making the module easy to run when you open the darned thing are EXACTLY what 11 year old me needed when he was asked to try to run Dread or Village of H at a moment's notice all those years ago. Now if we could only get most of the major producers to get those "module as technical writing principles" as well it would probably get even more people playing...
I agree with this, and almost talked about it in the post you responded to. The early modules were sandboxy, but did a poor job of teaching you how to use them, other than repeated admonitions to "make it your own" and, in some, advice that the NPCs should respond to PC actions (how?). Like, Hommlet has great content but lousy presentation (bite me squeen); you know there is supposed to be tension between the factions, but other than the odd bit of suspicion there is no guidance as to how that should play out. The sample of play in the DMG and some of the Basic+ books weren't sample of this kind of play.
I think I have said this before, but it bears repeating. Modules like Hommlet are great because of the stories surrounding them, that DMs and players tell about how it turned out, which give some inkling about how to play. The transmission of this knowledge for a long time was of older players to younger players, but now there is a lot on the internet. But the kicker is, you need to know it is there to look for it, which is getting harder due to the enshitification of Google. OTOH, railroady modules teach DMs exactly how they are supposed to be run by laying everything out for them.
DMSGuild could really benefit from a series of supplements that explain how to run classic modules in the classic style, like a
Beginner's Guide to Running the Village of Hommlet (or whatever).
Now I'm trying to play BECMI with my kids and I CAN'T UNTRAIN MYSELF. They're rolling dice to find the secret doors and open the locks. They have yet to trigger a trap, but I would imagine once they've been stung once, they'll be rolling dice for that as well. There's a huge room in B5 where a pair of tamed wolves are guarding the corpses of their dead adventurer masters. My kids wanted to just attack them. And on the other side, I've been trained to NOT coach the players, but who the hell is going to show these guys how to play? The elf NPC is like "hey, maybe those are pets. They look hungry..." They met their first Thoul (easily THE BEST MONSTER IN DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS fight me) and could not for the life of them figure out how to make the sonofabitch stop regenerating. The cleric NPC is like "maybe try cauterizing the wounds with fire?" and I feel dirty now. But yeah, mainly the interaction. I don't have the attention span for it anymore. I don't want to spend half an hour sitting around while the players try pulling on torch sconces and pushing random stones and pulling books off the shelf. Something has been lost.
Yeah, this is hard. I have had some success by explaining the advantages out of game (e.g. "Your chance of the thief finding a trap is crappy, and traps are pretty lethal, but if you find it narratively it is automatic" - also works for treasure). If they are pixel-bitching I remind them that every time they roll a check, I roll a wandering monster check. As for interacting with monsters, the monsters may need to take the lead for a while ("If you kill me, you'll never find the Ruby of Balthazaar!" the bandit says as he eats the treasure map).
I think it's a matter of tailoring the incentives to the players. I assume, in addition to killing the wolves, they didn't skin them; have them encounter a furrier with a sign in his window, "Will pay GOLD for WOLF PELTS". Oops. Then, when they try to sell pelts later, "Hmm, see those white tufts on the ears? This skin came from a white-tipped wolf. Pity you had to kill it, those things are easy to train and are worth 10 times as much alive." Oops again.
I think the best practice for things like the thoul are to have hints. The first troll or thoul is a puzzle monster. Like, if every humanoid has a campfire, and you point out that this one doesn't. Or there have been thoul attacks lately, and the only caravans that were attacked were the ones carrying sunrods/cold fire torches, while the thing has inexplicably run away from smaller parties that carried torches. A smithy was inexplicably left alone while the houses around it were sacked. Someone saw it running away from an ooze. You found the body of a famous troll hunter, and he is carrying lots of oil and vials of acid. Also, if the thoul is a boss, they might actually have enough sense to run away if they haven't figured out the solution and are getting their asses kicked.
Although honestly, in a world where trolls are are only uncommon, I figure stories about how they are defeated are pretty common, and pretty much everyone knows their vulnerabilities. In which case some oldtimer may be able to say of the rarer thoul, "It regenerates, eh? Only monster I know that regenerates is a troll. Fire and acid is good for trolls, but I don't know what might work for this thing."
