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Overlapping your options 1 and 2 -- roughly 30-120 (Oct 1979 - April 1987), with the highest peak c. 50-100 (July 1981 - Aug 1985).

If you expect her to actually read the rulebook and learn the game more-or-less on her own, then the 1983 red-box D&D Basic Set (edited by Frank Mentzer, with cover art by Larry Elmore) is by far the best choice. It's at a reading and content level suitable to 9-10 year olds (but not totally...

Tell the players out-of-game that you screwed up by letting that powerful an item into play and think it's ruining the game so you're going to get rid of it. Sound out from the players whether they'd prefer to have the item disappear by pure fiat (at the beginning of the next session it's as if...

While I was the DM about 90% of the time in our old AD&D group, several of the other players also owned the DMG and had at least passing familiarity with its contents. The dire warnings in the DMG intro about players prying into it being "worthy of less than honorable death" and so on, were at...

1. The "Gygaxian Flavor": a kitchen-sink melange of Howard and Leiber meets Vance meets de Camp & Pratt meets Burroughs meets Merritt meets Lovecraft meets Tolkien meets Moorcock meets a dozen other authors all filtered through one man's creative vision. Nowadays people think of this as "the D&D...

Generalized d20-based ability checks (i.e. roll your stat or less on 1d20) began showing up in third-party products in the late 70s (and were probably mentioned in APAzines even earlier) -- Judges Guild's Caverns of Thracia (1979), for instance, includes several such instances. The Dig spell...

Let's see: 1. The excess of fiddly minutiae and special case rules, especially in the spell descriptions (prime example: the identify spell -- if you haven't read this in 10 or 20 years, take a look; it's a doozy: 2. Too many things seemingly aribitrarily changed for the sake of change from...

The method of early campaigns (and the default assumption of the OD&D rules) is definitely that there's a large and fluid player-base, with a few dedicated/hard-core players and a larger periphery or more casual, less skilled, or less active players (e.g. someone who lives out of town or has a...

I've certainly gamed with rules-lawyers, people with an accountant's obsessiveness over tracking gold, supplies, and XP and self-styled "doctors" quick to tell everyone the "realistic" effects of various wounds and conditions ;)

The RC and OD&D are both very good and you can't really go wrong with either of them. I'd recommend getting both, reading both, and deciding which is a better fit with the sort of campaign you want to run. The RC has a lot more rules, which can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your...

What Thornir Alekeg said. Plus, there might be other miscellaneous inscriptions or writings written in "magical script" that requires a read magic spell to decipher, at the DM's discretion. Wands or other magic items having their command words inscribed on them in magical script is something...

That's my interpretation -- that if the rangers knows read magic he can add new spells to his spell book from other mages' books, but if he doesn't he can't. So considering that, yeah it's probably a good idea for rangers to take read magic as one of their two spells. I don't think they should...

1) I'd assume, for lack of any indication to the contrary, that rangers have spell books just like normal magic-users (which also suggests the same Chance to Know and Min/Max Spells/Level rules apply to rangers) and that a mage would be able to read a ranger's spell books with use of a read...

The AD&D PH says specifically that rangers can't use druid or magic-user scrolls. I'd extrapolate from that to say that rangers not only don't get read magic automatically, they don't get it at all (unless, perhaps, they take it as one of their 2 "free" spells?) and thus most rangers are...

FWIW that came from memory, so some of the specifics may be a bit off. If anybody has this write-up handy and wants to correct anything in my post, feel free :) EDIT: OK, looked it up myself -- OD&D rangers only get hit dice up to 9th level (10 HD total), so they only have a 1 HD advantage over...

The OD&D ranger (from TSR#2) is basically the same as the 1E ranger, but a little bit better. He still gets 2d8 at 1st level and 1d8 per level thereafter up to 10th, which is significant because the fighter in those days got 1d8 per level up to 9th (so the ranger ends up with a full 2HD...

Here's a fairly detailed summary by Grodog of the "Dwarven Quest for the Rod of Seven Parts" adventure written by Frank Mentzer and run as an RPGA tournament in 1982 (and after -- I played in it at a local con in 1987!).

No wonder - those guys were like super-characters! Extra hit die at 1st level (of the same type as normal fighters -- they got 1d8, rangers got 2d8), automatic +25% XP bonus, etc. The AD&D ranger class is a toned-down version of the SR ranger.

Treasure Type H: 25% chance of 3-24,000 CP, 50% chance of 1-100,000 SP, 75% chance of 10-60,000 GP (Vol. II, p. 22); Very Old dragons may have as much as double the indicated treasure (Vol. II, p. 14) = average treasure-hoard of approx. 110,000 coins, and potential maximum hoard of 368,000 coins :)

:confused: There are no thief abilities for rangers in UA. The most substantive change to the ranger class in UA was the stricture that they had to choose among a certain subset of weapons for their initial proficiencies and weren't allowed to go outside that group until they had one from each...