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Idealistic to us now, certainly. At the time, I'm not so sure. I'm not sure if you've read them but the Sharpe novels by Bernard Cornwell make quite a bit of point of how the expectation of officers was that they were to be clear "gentlemen" and superior to the rank and file. Now those are about...

Oh, I'm not talking about philosophical opposition, but the pretty heavy burden of legal discrimination that existed. For instance, under British rule, Catholics couldn't own property, be officers in the army, or vote (assuming they met the restrictive conditions of the franchise). In the USA...

Franklin was a Deist (as were a number of the other Founding Fathers) but he was notable for being pretty stridently anti-Catholic. This was not uncommon for an Englishman of his time and, indeed, in England, Catholic emancipation didn't happen until 1829. Many of these same attitudes existed in...

I think it's important not to make historical figures too good, projecting our own desires onto them. Franklin, for instance, was stridently anti-Catholic (not at all unusual for someone of his time and origin), there is good reason to suppose in the leadup to the Revolution was playing both...

Washington was indeed a skilled surveyor and had spent a lot of time on the frontier when he was in British colonial service during the Seven Years' War (known here as the French and Indian War). I'm not sure I'd agree Washington was a tactical genius. For instance, he made some really doofus...

My step-mom's dissertation advisor (no longer alive) knew Gygax very well. I did get a sense from him that Gygax realized later on that things had gotten to his head at points, which is, of course, not at all an uncommon thing to have happen. Many a small business that takes off has similar...

The 1E DMG was an awesome SAT word study guide. There is a surprising number of statisticians of my rough cohort who first learned about statistics due to it, to---while the field is hot now (in the guise of "data science") that was certainly not the case back in the day.

I was going to say that: Big fish in a small pond-ism. That happens a lot. I've dealt with people like that and in general they are a real pain.

Yes, there is likely to be a LOT of selection bias there, with many (but not all) con players being much better than home game players, many of whom were kids.

A lot of that is latter day hyperbole and hearsay, I suspect. The MU required a player who had a decent sense of timing and some reasonable tactics. Much of the time, though, players were tactical morons. If they were, then, yes, the MU would get owned, especially at low levels. I suspect that...

Unquestionably. If you just rely on natural healing it's very slow. I'm running a fairly cleric-less game---a common thing for me---using my house ruled 2E which has a very post-apocalyptic feel to it, but I've introduced a number of things that allow for somewhat faster recovery. For example...

Haha, as OP asa people said Unearthed Arcana was, no, it doesn't replace the effects of a magic user or cleric.

You can but game systems don't tend to model them really well. I've actually played pre-3E D&D with minimal spellcasters. It's a MUCH harder game.

Certainly, good tactics very much orient around the idea of knocking foes out of the fight, not on scattered attacks. Any group that does that routinely are just tactically foolish. (IMO this kind of suboptimal play is dumb, not RP-interesting.) As you say, one big benefit that Area Effect...

That was true in fairly low levels but once magic users got Web (3rd level) and then Fireball (5th level) things started to change, at least with good timing. However, they were vulnerable and had limited resources. Look out if they got wands or the like, though. Magic users were the artillery...

Unquestionably the game I've played/run the most over the years is D&D and my favorite version of it is my house-ruled-to-my-taste 2E. I'm still running a campaign that I started in 1999, albeit with some substantial periods of hiatus. However, I have definitely enjoyed other games quite a bit...

That is so, so true. It's particularly so with something that requires group buy in, like gaming. A lot of pop culture is like that too, insofar as it get reinforced by collective conversation. Look how fast Game of Thrones has disappeared now that there are no new episodes. But gaming is very...

100%. I don't feel like there's some giant loss to me if I prep some things the PCs don't encounter. I usually just work out the rough XP math (using Kobold Fight Club) and make a basic room or terrain. If the room is interesting I'll keep it and use it later. If it's just a room... eh, whatever.

What I'm trying to do is represent a few possible paths with interesting choices. If the players decide to complicate things, I can roll with it too, but there are often consequences for that. Right, in fact the whole point of my "subway map" dungeon is focused on that very premise. I'm not...

I agree with the desert but even so, there are players or groups---even ones who've played for many years---who just don't do sandbox well, for instance falling into choice paralysis. I agree with you---I like that approach and have used it myself. I couldn't draw it easily in ASCII either...