On bondage in OD&D

Todays post will intercept the discussion of attributes in OD&D with some thoughts and questions about how much players and player characters tended to 'bond' in campaigns played in ancient times. And no, I don't mean that type of bondage but the title was too cool to resist ;-)

After yesterdays post about generating attributes for player characters I asked on the OD&D discussion boards how others handled this issue. I found the response by Tom Bowings (or actually Ian..) particularly interesting (quoted for your comfort):

Well, it depends whether you think bonding is a good thing. I tend to have very high mortality games and the players who want/need to have characters in the literary sense of the usually end up dropping out.

His straightforward and 'brutal' approach rang a bell with me as it made me remember my very early 'roleplaying' games when characters died in scores and we viewed D&D more of a challenge game than intense roleplaying (and please take in mind that I don't want to preach about which way is the better approach - you cater to different tastes).

This more brutal approach seems to be pretty well in line with the way I figure the very early campaigns must have started out. Quite often postings describe how campaigns evolved as a battle of wits between the referee and the players and all kind of nasty and evil changes were the talk of the day. I also remember fondly my first Tunnels & Trolls campaign in which characters dropped like flies and we actually introduced an experience point high score to immortalize the fallen. It's a different way to play but this approach can be a lot of fun and I agree with Ian that you shouldn't bond too much with characters for such a campaign because life can be really short.

I don't think that the rules for 'The Fantasy Game' will prefer one approach over the other but I would like to hear how you view this. Should characters be planned for a long life time with all the care and detail that this might involve, should this depend on the luck of both the player and the characters during the first few adventures or is character elaboration just something that happens occasionally on the fly?