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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bullgrit" data-source="post: 4986733" data-attributes="member: 31216">Way back in my earliest days of D&D (age 13-14), I was not especially well read or worldly -- I was an average teenager of 1980.In reading D&D books back in the day, especially those written by E. Gary Gygax, I often came across a reference to some archaic bit of knowledge/information that I had no way of knowing. We didn't have the Internet or Wikipedia to easily look up such things, so many times the reference just got missed or given an odd look and skipped.Usually this wasn't a serious problem, but sometimes not knowing or understanding the reference meant I either just didn't get the meaning of the text or even completely misunderstood it.For instance:In the module Keep on the Borderlands, there's the rumor for the PCs about "Bree-Yark!" The text explained that it's like the circus call of "Hey Rube!"I had never heard of "Hey Rube!" I had no idea what this meant. I took the reference to mean that "Bree Yark" was pronounced as "hay ruub" -- and this made no sense to me.Eventually, through talking with other D&D players, I figured out what Bree Yark really meant, but it was about 30 years after first reading that text that I ever saw any other reference to "Hey Rube!" My oldest son was watching a Scooby Doo episode where the gang is at a circus, and the ring master called out, "Hey Rube!" when a scheme was going down. I remember saying out loud (to my son's confusion), "So that's how it works."In the module Secret of the Slavers Stockade, the text mentions there's a "dog-eared deck of cards" on a table. I had never heard of anything "dog-eared," and since the cards belonged to a bunch of terrible and nasty humanoids, I assumed the cards were actually made of dogs' ears. Fortunately, I didn't go 30 years before learning what this meant.Now, I did learn a lot of new words from D&D books (especially EGG's work), and I started reading more due to D&D. But thinking back, it is kind of curious how the early material (especially EGG's) seemed to be written for older, better read, and more worldly-knowledgeable readers. It's like EGG didn't even consider that 10-14 year old kids would be reading the material (even the Basic D&D material), and wouldn't get much of the archaic references. (Thank goodness for some of the glossaries.)Now adays, from what I've seen in the current (since 2000) books, things like "Hey Rube" and "dog-eared" would be edited to something like "Alarm" and "well-worn."Is this good or bad, in your opinion?Bullgrit</blockquote>

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