molonel said:
On one part, I was not entirely correct. You can fight OR run away. That's still not "moving silently." It has no utility beyond getting the drop and attacking first, or simply not fighting and going back the way you came. Only a thief can do otherwise.
And that's still silly.
These are the stealth mechanics I'm supposed to be impressed by that it took several people who supposedly know the rules a while to find?
Its a difference in attitude toward play. Modern RPGs (meaning, well, at least anything since Chaosium's BRP system hit the market - maybe earlier) assume that the numbers that you define for your character can define almost everything about your character. Older RPGs (of which 1e AD&D certainly applies) do not. The D&D rules system gave you rules for combat and that was pretty much it. If it didn't apply to combat, it didn't have a rule in the system.
For some folks, this is a great, liberating thing. You have a set of rules for fighting each other, and then out of combat every DM had his own set of rules for how what we would consider "skills" could be resolved. Commonly, this came down to an "is it reasonable" approach to the situation -- if it was something someone could reasonably do, you could do it. If it was unreasonable, you couldn't. And in those occasional situations where you just couldn't tell as a DM if something was reasonable or not, you'd wing it, throw some dice, and make up a result.
For other folks, this kind of DM fiat annoys them. Some DMs are not good at all at adjudicating what is reasonable. Other DMs, used to more traditional wargames or boardgames, took the approach that if there wasn't a rule, you couldn't do it. This is especially the case as the game grew and you ended up with rules for things like "move silently" for thieves. Since there was a rule for how to move silently for thieves and not for anyone else, to some DMs it was obvious that the rules only allowed thieves to move silently. Or to climb walls. Or anything else that a character should "reasonably" be able to do but that the rules didn't explicitly say that the character could do by the rules.
As time passed, a lot of the folks annoyed by the fast and loose approach drifted off into rules sets that supported their preferred style of game play - Runequest, GURPS, etc. And over time D&D grew to pull these ideas into itself -- the proficiency rules in the 1e Dungeoneers Survival Guide, for example, let you explicitly start detailing that your character knew about cooking, or fire building, or whatever. And the rules became more schizophrenic, with 3 different skill systems bolted onto the game when 2e came out (non-weapon proficiencies, weapon proficiencies, and thief skills all treated differently).
3e certainly simplified the mess that 2e refused to clean up, and it supports the dominant form of roleplaying nowadays, which is one where every aspect of your character is outlined on your character sheet. Again, to some folks this is liberating because they always have an answer for any question that comes up -- worst case that answer is "roll a d20 and add an ability bonus". Other folks find the rules horribly constrictive because there ARE rules for everything now and winging it feels like you're breaking the rules or screwing over players somehow. In many ways, the 3e rule set is supporting a completely different style of role playing than older versions of the game were built for.
