AmerginLiath
Adventurer
I wonder to what degree the experience was due to 1st Edition and what degree it was due to Luke Gygax running 1st Edition. It’s often debated how tight or loose the rules of the game should be, but a tighter ruleset (such as more modern versions) is going to necessarily have a closer range of outcomes in running the system. For forty years, there’s been the debate over how gamer’s primary exposure to convention modules has colored their perception of how 1st Edition “should” be run (versus how we increasingly hear from the original Lake Geneva groups over how the original game was run). To have one of EGG’s sons (an original player) run a game is likely going to be a different experience than running a commercial module in one’s basement parsing playstyle from the DMG and Dragon Magazine (note how the modern game can be impacted by our interface on boards like this; see how surprised many were to hear the “humans without feats” reports, for example). Mearls is at the very center of the modern d20 universe, so he’s going to be involved in a different D&D world than Luke Gygax (even though it shares a common genealogy); even as someone who has played 1st Edition before, Mearls previous ‘basement’ experiences with the ruleset are going to be different than this EGG-alumni experience.