Players of the game "&"
"Dragons? Dragons in my campaign are GODS. The players can never beat dragons! Ever! They'll only see one once in their lifetime and it will have more hitpoints than every living person in the whole campaign world, and be so intelligent and dexterous that they couldn't even think about hitting it in combat before it did 100d1000 damage to them!"
"Dungeons? Pah. Dungeons are illogical, meaningless toys of days gone by. They're a hallmark of a bad DM. Gygax was, of course, completely insane for assuming anyone would want to continue a campaign in a dungeon. Where's the storytelling? Where's the high drama? Adventures in dungeons have no place in my campaign."
These two conversations are a condensation of a lot of the attitude I've seen DM's take over the years. Dungeon masters seem content to forget the context of the old tropes of D&D as quickly as they forget who ordered what on the pizza. The complaint goes up that dragons are "too easy" in AD&D. This is, of course, patently false: any DM worth his or her salt will play dragons intelligently and as powerfully as they can and in doing so can fell the characters of all but the most determined and clever players. Too many times, the unimaginative DM merely looks at the "lowly" hit-points a middle-aged dragon has (44) and assumes that because it isn't much tougher than an ogre in terms of "survivability" that it will fall like wheat before a thresher. They fall back on the ill-thought notions presented in later editions of AD&D and D&D - that a dragon has to be the size of a 747, possess an arch-mage's spell book and be endowed with hundreds of hit points to be a considerable threat to an adventuring party. Worse still are the DMs who arbitrarily treat dragons like some sort of scaly god, capable of sweeping away even powerful demons with a wave of their clawed hands - which is not to mention how they view the adventuring party! Both notions are a hallmark of an infectious mindset that has worked backwards through the D&D community, starting with 2nd edition, for years. Gods are, if introduced into a D&D context, enough of a threat (or boon) to players to keep them running about for quite a bit. The notion that every greedy treasure mongering lizard should somehow command the respect and obeisance of a party of doughty adventurers and their henchmen is laughable. Dragons should be just tough enough.
For example, Brazzamael of G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King, is a sinister old beast who is working an angle with the aforementioned king - perhaps piling up whatever unwanted treasure the fire giants and drow will give him, or exacting it as payment. Is he tough? To be sure! Play him craftily, DMs, and he will prove quite the formidable obstacle to your party! Treat him with the awed reverence of the Dragonlance or Forgotten Realms fanboy and the whole party may as well pack up and go home. Of course, approaching the dragon with that mindset would mean that the old lizard would be the focus of the machinations of the entire world and would therefore be entirely unapproachable by the party!
Regarding the dungeon...I'm not quite sure what game it is that people have been playing since 1989 that makes them regard the slimy caves and dripping stone hallways of orc and kobold, lizard man and mad wizard as some kind of anathema but it is not Dungeons & Dragons by any stretch! "Well," a counter-argument goes, "there's lots of great fantasy literature that doesn't involve dungeon crawls, you know..." Stop right there. This is where the argument already begins to lose steam: the notion that D&D is or has to be some sort of fantasy literature emulator. Sure, there's a great list of inspirational reading for fantasy novels, but D&D is not (or at least was not) designed to be coupled to a set of novels. Ever! Books make great inspiration for D&D, but they shouldn't substitute for the DM's sense of fun!
Another argument is that the dungeon is illogical. Many "Gygaxian" traits of older D&D are cast in such a light, and in response I paraphrase the master himself and say that if you can accept the notion of magic, monsters, gods and demons why in the nine hells is it impossible to accept that these things can take place in a fiendish maze underground?! Suddenly a DM has to be the campaign world's Sierra Club and make sure that encounters are ecologically balanced and environmentally friendly? A DM who lets the notion of "funhouse dungeons" run amok in his or her own campaign might encounter the ire of players tired of tribes of trolls with kobold butlers, certainly. But a little forethought by the DM would well avoid this trap and keep the players interested in underground on goings.
Dungeon masters who dismiss the underground adventure as being "primitive" or "childish" do a disservice to players, and rob themselves of a great creativity tool.
I rarely take the position that anyone plays D&D "wrong". Some folks house-rule things I wouldn't; some folks include written rules I'd house-rule. But if you're going to strip away two of the key elements of the game (dragons being fought underground didn't show up on the covers of at least three different D&D rulebooks "just because", dear reader), then you're not playing Dungeons & Dragons any longer. The Dungeon is gone, the Dragon has either been elevated to godhood or removed from the player's grasp in one fashion or another, forever. You're just playing "&".