...many players mistook the play style that early D&D is designed around. Many players who hadn't been playing since the very beginning saw the book covers, with heroic-looking characters confronting dragons, and assumed that the game was about heroes fighting the good fight. But things like random encounters and the gold=xp rule actually encourage players to avoid direct conflict whenever possible. Which tends to create a strong nab-the-loot, combat-as-war, Conan-mercenary dynamic. You get most XP from gathering treasure, so the adventure becomes a logistical puzzle to solve: How do we avoid random encounters and other hazards which yield minimal/no treasure (i.e., XP) in order to get to the loot, and then get home alive?.
From what you gather or experienced? Because that was not my experience. I did not give that much XP for treasure and none for coin. Monsters were the main source for XP most of the time.
And this is where the wonderful nature of humanity, art, and social development mixes it all up and creates lovely new stuff from misunderstanding.
I agree with Tequila Sunrise - That WAS what early DnD was best at. But I also agree with brvheart - back in 1979 when I began playing, that is NOT how we played around here. The channel of information/instruction from game designer to us playing this brand new game in distant Sweden was a narrow one - we only had the game books to go by, and they were thin back then. Remember, this is pre DMG days. We played the game as we understood it, and so did thousands of others all over the world, and from all these "misunderstandings" the game evolved into the hundreds of games, campaign-styles, and storytelling techniques we all love.
What I am trying to say is that when something is as murky and hard to understand as the early DnD rules, human intellect and imagination will fill in the gap - and do so in a way that fits each of us better than the original work, perfectly understood, ever could have.
Another example of this is when I try to write something inspired by a book or movie I enjoyed a long time ago - I never look up the original work beforehand. I find it much more inspirational to work from things half-remembered, enjoyed perhaps 20 years ago or more. Because when I do, my imagination fills out any holes in my memory, and the result is my work and much less of a pastiche than it could have been. Sometimes I do look up the work afterwards, and am often disappointed - "my version" often feels more interesting and more poignant to me, memory having filtered the parts of the work that I didn't relate to.
There is a value in a sketchy description, memory, or even rule - it allows each of us to fill in the blanks.
