Basic synopsis: early (pre-Advanced) D&D was not so much a game as a bunch of ideas, not including such basic things as actually telling you how to play the game.
The little books did not tell you how to play.
The point of Matt's video is that in the period covered, variation was even larger than that because the D&D books did not tell you how to play the game.
I am by no means trying to pick on
@jasper and
@Staffan, who I understand are just reporting what Matt said in the video, but this was the one thing I really took issue with in Matt's video, so I want to push back on it. As I recall, in the video he even goes as far as to call original D&D "incomplete," and "not a full game."
IMO, that is not the case
at all. If you look back, there are things (most notably Initiative) missing that are considered as a matter-of-course in D&D, but the book explains how to play, including an example of play that is very clearly the essential gameplay loop of RPGs (GM describes surroundings/what happens, players say what they will do, GM adjudicates/resolves the actions). There is a point where Matt reads from Arduin Grimoire, where it explains wilderness travel and wandering monster encounters, as if it is some great revelation.
Everything he read is in the original rules.
D&D was a complete game. It described how to play clearly enough that it was a commercial success, and people across the country were playing it
essentially the same. Yes, absolutely, there were immediately big differences in play
styles, but everyone was following the same gameplay loop described in the original D&D booklets. I would further argue that this was
not because of how the rules were presented. Differences in playstyles persisted even with people who came to the game from AD&D with its excessive comprehensiveness, and Basic D&D with its tightly constrained ruleset.
What D&D was not was a
closed game. It was, by intention, entirely open outside the essential gameplay loop, with even the rules that were included in the original books called out as being essentially suggestions and handy heuristics, to be used or ignored by the Referee as he saw fit. The wildly varying playstyles was by design.
Finally, I'm not particularly a fan of AD&D (B/X is more my speed), but people want to ascribe all these intentions to its publication. It was Gary trying to leash the storm he'd released. Or it was Gary trying to cut Arneson out of royalties. Or both! I would respectfully submit that it was published in response to
market demand. The PHB and MM are straightforward compilations and clean-up of the rules that had accrued in supplements and magazines since the publication of the original books. The DMG is filled with all these fiddly rules because
people wanted those fiddly rules, and other people/companies were eager to provide them. I'm sure Gary hoped that AD&D would keep people buying TSR stuff, who might otherwise go elsewhere. I'm sure Gary relished the idea of reaping royalties from three new official books that had only his name on them. But those were not the reasons that AD&D was written and published.
