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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 6026783" data-attributes="member: 32740">Neither of those terms have a dictionary definition.  I say it is old school.  Just because it is old school doesn't mean that the "new school" cannot or does not feature elements of old school approaches to play.  However, I do think that older versions of the game did indeed feature and emphasize things that newer versions choose to disregard and deemphasize and that that does have an effect upon how people learn to approach the game.  In plenty of instances the things that newer versions chose to deemphasize, alter or remove were right to be treated that way.[qoute]The AD&D books, and lots of commentary in Dragon and elsewhere from back in the day, clearly indicate that the point of AD&D was to be played as written.  To the point of being actively obnoxious about it, and calling out folks who "did it wrong" as having games that weren't worthy of being called AD&D games.</blockquote>There certainly was an attempt by Gygax and others to build a ruleset that would be used consistently and which would have a solid core of rules which everyone did use.  They wanted something that could be run at conventions where people from any part of the country could sit down at a table and not have to read through 30 pages of house rules, additions and deletions before being able to play.  That had become something of an issue with D&D and which explains why 1E AD&D is so much more complicated and thick with rules making basic D&D look like a pamphlet.  There were prodigious amounts of house rules being assembled and they wanted to pull some order back out of the chaos.There was the rather infamous comment by Gygax (I forget exactly where - The Strategic Review maybe?) where he said something to the effect of, "If you're not playing the rules as written you're not actually playing D&D."  My impression has long been that it was seen quite readily as hyperbole, and in any case he wasn't trying to say, "play it MY way or you're doing it wrong," but that he was still trying to create an accepted core of rules to facilitate tournament play.The idea of, "Do it THIS way or you're doing it WRONG," was a more recent phenomenon.  Certainly in 1E Gygax made it quite clear that he accepted and expected that everyone would continue to make whatever changes they considered to be improvements on the rules.[/QUOTE]

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