It really comes down to the attitudes of players. I can enjoy playing WotC-D&D on occasion, but I have refused to DM a campaign partly because the player-culture I have encountered demands an approach that is too limited for my taste to what's in books.
This is not a big problem due to a shortage of pages I could read, or of itemized things and accounting procedures with which I could "build" variations. It is a problem because I do not care to spend the money, time and energy dealing with that stuff instead of using my imagination.
(Programming and playing video games is also fun, but a different kind than what I look for in a paper-and-pencil game. I guess there may be analogies in my preference for 1980s platforms, but the trade-offs there are much more significant.)
I learned to play D&D in the "little brown books" era, and my introduction really did not entail learning thing one about the printed rules! I think I had the six ability scores of my character, but not technical details as to how the DM would use them. I just told the DM what I wanted to do, and rolled whatever dice he told me to roll (which did not come up as often as in many recent games).
That was just the way it was very often played among those into whose hands the booklets had come
after a DM had taught them in an "oral tradition" going back probably to the games of Arneson and Gygax.
Naturally, customs came to vary in different branches of that distribution. The text itself was often vague, and furthermore encouraged experimentation and variation -- which was simply expected anyhow in the wargames culture in which it originated.
GNOLLS: A cross between Gnomes and Trolls (... perhaps, Lord Dunsany did not really make it clear) with +2 morale. Otherwise, they are similar to Hobgoblins ...
(In "How Nuth Would Have Practiced His Art Upon The Gnoles", their treatment of an intruder is veiled in darkness.)
Hobgoblins were "large and fierce Goblins". Goblins were simply "small monsters" (actually more physical description than in the
Chainmail book to which D&D referred the reader). Trolls were "thin and rubbery, loathsome". Gnomes actually got a colorful writeup that served as well to define Dwarves by contrast.
The
Monster Manual was a great leap forward in standardization if only for its illustrations. I doubt for instance that many had ever imagined kobolds that way!
The early books and magazine articles were less
prescriptive of how to play than
descriptive of different people's experiments in fantasy gaming. D&D was more of a "world unto itself" than a simulation of any fictional world -- but the D&D world was a vast agglomeration of elements from whatever fictional or other inspirations might appeal to individual Dungeon Masters.
Every single thing in it came from a DM somewhere, and what are now "classic" or "standard" bits got added in what was an ongoing process. It was not much a matter of decrees sent "down" from a separate class of "professional game designers".
Web sites such as EN World give us much more ability to converse than the old magazines (including APAs) ever could, even more than the BBS sites of yore. Whereas The Chaosium could not ** literally ** publish more than a tiny fraction of
All The Worlds' Monsters in the 1970s, today everyone's creations can get out there -- not only to ease the burden on the hard-working DM but also to give fresh sparks to the imagination.
