ExploderWizard
Hero
Old Geezer was right. There really are people who cannot take a dump unassisted.
How so? 1E is a bit needlessly complex. I prefer Moldvay basic for OSR gaming but I don't see how 1E disempowers creativity. If anything, OSR systems empower creativity by having fewer cut & dried options. AD&D as written is a bit too fiddly for my tastes though.
Old Geezer was right. There really are people who cannot take a dump unassisted.
Personally I have found DMs coming up with rulings off the top of their head to be pretty hit or miss, mostly because people are really bad at determining probability under pressure.
I mean take an example of the DM allowing someone to do a whirlwind attack to try and hit three enemies at once with a -5 penalty to their attack. It might seem a reasonable call on the face of it, but in reality it either turns out to be so ridiculously difficult to hit that you are better off just making a normal attack or so ridiculously good that you always want to try to whirlwind attack as much as you can.
A good GM either:
1. Would do it right (and you'd know because play afterwards would bear it out) or
2. Would go "let me get back to you on a mechanic for that", for now you can't or
3. Would go "Doing the math on that is too complicated right now"
That's a good DM. The one who immediately does it and it's ridiculously over- or under- powered? That's a bad dm.
Either the player trusts the DM or does not.I would imagine that doing it right just means coming up with an answer that the player also thinks is reasonable in the moment
. It is not a bad DM, it is just a DM who can not calculate probabilities under pressure. Which is just a normal DM using rules that expects the DM to be making rulings
Even if it was just about nostalgia (which it’s not), that would be OK. There’s nothing wrong with nostalgia.