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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarf Zagyg" data-source="post: 9387815" data-attributes="member: 7023840">Whenever I do one of my longer thread starters, I do my very best to scrupulously check dates and original sources. Partly it's because I enjoy doing the research, and partly it's because I am fallible. My memory of things is not always correct; for example, I have a strong memory of playing a certain module at a certain time, but I know for a fact that it couldn't have happened because the module wasn't released for several years after that memory! It's not that I want to be deceitful- either to myself, and certainly not in recounting the story, but just that after the passage of decades, events can morph, change, and bleed into one another. It happens.The whole of the TSR era can often act like that type of confused memory. The primary issue is that all of the TSR products were largely interchangeable and interoperable. It was possible to, for example, play through B2 - a module designed for OD&D and released for B/X - using rules for 2e. In addition, the prevalence of homebrew, 3PP, semi-official rules (Dragon, Strategic Review), and lack of internet at the time for standardization can make things incredibly confusing, not to mention the nomenclature ... (Oh, Basic? Do you mean Holmes, Moldvay, or Mentzer?).Nevertheless, there often is a strict delineation in those rules. 1e was different before UA ... and different than 2e. Holmes Basic (which is OD&D) is not Moldvay Basic (which is the BECMI line, or "Basic"). People often "read into" certain rules other rules that they remember from other eras in TSR - for example, I have seen that it is exceedingly common for people to "read back" 2e rules into 1e, primarily because they played 2e more recently.I mention this because it is exceedingly common for people to confuse the different rulesets with the passage of time. For example, Gygax was famously again crits, and even had a diatribe against them in the DMG, and they did not exist in 1e in the core rules ... in fact, even rolling a 20 did not guarantee that you hit, although it did in BECMI/RC. This changed in 2e, with the optional critical hits in the DMG that many adopted. However, there are those that still remember core rules that provided for critical hits in 1e. Memory is funny that way!Part of that is simply because the rules are interoperable and similar. Part of it is because people were more likely to play 2e more recently than 1e. And part of it is because <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/understanding-history-why-serious-scholarship-of-d-d-matters.698849/" target="_blank">memory is a tricky thing</a>.</blockquote>

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