The more I hear about it him, the more it seems like he either literally couldn't fathom that anyone could or should think differently than he did, at least when it came to gaming.3. Finally, Gary was often confused by what the players wanted. "Why would they want modules?" "Why would they want a campaign setting?" "Boy, it seems weird that the whole 'turn undead' thing took off, huh?"
The more you hear about who?
Gygax, sorry.
You can't change your facing after movement, and you are only facing one of them. 8 of them could attack you though. You are correct that pool of radiance attacked all of them.
Given the 1 minute OD&D-AD&D combat round, that would be weird if it were true.
That's not how facing worked in AD&D. Remember, no grid combat - this was string and ruler territory. Your front face, or arc, was basically 120 degrees in front of you, meaning you could attack at least 3 targets in front of you, and, arguably you could attack the target to either side of you as well. Directly behind might be an issue.
1e DMG (pp.69-70) covers facing, flanking, and position on the tabletop grid - both square and hex.
yeah...but how many people used squares or grid...I mean even official events by RPGA at Gen Con didn't use them.
You could still use facing rules without an actual grid, as long as you had minis or some other way of representing who/what was where in relation to who/what else and what direction they were facing. Even without that, it's a safe-ish enough take to just say you're facing roughly in the direction of whichever opponent you just attacked.
