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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Theron" data-source="post: 344745" data-attributes="member: 2326">As mentioned, before there was RPGing, there was wargaming.  And even then, there were the splits.  Avalon Hill fans vs. SPI fans.  Fans of a balanced, playable game vs. fans of a hard-core simulation.  Fans of miniatures vs. counter and board players. WWII fans vs. any other period of history fans, ad nauseam.When RPGs came along, they suddenly had a new target and stopped beating on each other (for a while).  A lot of us, having come to the new hobby from the old already had certain predispositions installed in our characters.  Arguing about things was one.  Arguing over ambiguous rules was another.  A brief reading of the original three books in a box should be sufficient to point where this is going.  I can remember a host of ridiculous arguments from my early days*, many of which were exacerbated by the fact that there were, effectively, three versions of D&D to interpret at the time - The original box, Basic D&D, and the first two books of AD&D (the MM and the PHB), which were coming out at roughly the rate of one per YEAR.  Add to this the descriptions of other people's games we heard at the local shops, or read about in Dragon or White Dwarf, and you have a host of bones of contention.  Throw in unofficial stuff like Judge's Guild and Arduin Products, mix in a tad of the cognitive dissonance between the rules and the fantasy we enjoyed reading and the stream got even murkier.So, being the argumentative and vindictive types we were pre-disposed to be from years of arguing "opportunity fire" rules in Panzerblitz, we went to it with gusto.  And along the line trained a new generation.  Who, in turn, trained another. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" />*The worst argument I ever remember was a DM who wouldn't let the players roll their own dice.  That one nearly turned into a fist fight.</blockquote>

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