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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7579461" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think this is one of those areas where it is hard to really parse what Gygax, or, maybe even more importantly, Arneson, was thinking. There were BOTH aspects of RP, including a concept of being 'in character', AND aspects of 'skilled play' which originate in wargames; from which D&D is directly derived. Thus it is QUITE POSSIBLE that Gary or Dave might have considered some instances of skilled play of the sort you describe as crossing a line, but not others.While I played D&D in the 1974-1979 period it is hard to really define exactly how things evolved. Virtually every group in 1974 was an isolated group of players who had little, if any, contact with other groups. Often entirely idiosyncratic approaches grew out of these games with little reference to what was intended by the game's authors, and no real way of knowing how they used it. Usually someone went and played with some other group, someone somewhere had gone to Gen Con, Strategic Review or The Dragon showed up with some sort of 'stuff' in it that gave some direction, but I would be hard pressed to be able to tell you what very many people did before 1978-ish when I had the fortune to join a LARGE gaming club (100's of active members that probably played 4-5 different D&D games every week just in the club space). There were common practices there, but I would say that there was usually not much concern for purity of approaches, and maybe the few GMs who had any hard notions about such things were considered fairly hard-core.</blockquote>

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