Tronasaurus

That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".

A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!

In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.

The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.

A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.

In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).

It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.

Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?

The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!

Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?

"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"

Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?

"It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.

"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?

“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.

"Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.

"The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.

just gotta throw my all-time favourite Giles scene into the mix

either way, she always has at least three kids, sometimes more. you don't want to ask when she had them, but she had to have them young because her youngest had to have been born when she was at least seventeen based on how time works. you just watch it happen. you can't save her.

she's smiling but there's something missing in her eyes - a spark that should be there. there's no passion, there's just the movements of the day. sometimes she'll give an interview where she says she barely feels like getting out of bed, and other times she says nothing. you just watch it happen. you can't save her.

her world isn't real - it's neat kitchens and made from scratch cheese. she tells you how she doesn't need feminism because she likes this life, she likes wearing pretty dresses, don't you dare pity her. you just watch it happen. you can't save her.

you scroll up to an ex tradewife in her forties talking about how her husband divorced her and left her for a younger girl, leaving her destitute and penniless and twenty years out of the workforce. you scroll again to a pretty young girl saying she doesn't need a job, her husband will take care of her. you scroll again. you just watch it happen. you can't save her.

another woman, this time in her early thirties, talking about how she just managed to leave her abusive husband and has nothing and he took the kids, warning and pleading young girls to not fall for tradwife lies. you scroll again to a young tradwife girl saying that would never happen to her, and you're just jealous of her. you just watch it happen. you can't save her.

you scroll again. a teen girl tells you that she'll just track her period, she doesn't NEED a toxic chemical like birth control. you scroll again to an obgyn pleading with young girls to understand birth control is just hormonal, and that period tracking isn't effective. you just watch happen. you can't save her.

you scroll again, and it's jd vance saying how women belong in the homes and shouldn't be allowed to vote. that their husbands should decide how they should vote. you scroll again to a domestic abuse counselor telling women their vote is private and they can lie to their husbands. you just watch it happen. you can't save her.