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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9361833" data-attributes="member: 7026594">I think that's largely correct, but remember that there was also a very fertile and frenetically creative (a bit less visible in TSR products but clearly visible in the zine scene and the explosion of other RPGs) period before the game took off and really came into the awareness of normies and reactionaries like Pulling.  And people were definitely exploring more character-centered and dramatic play, which would feature such moral dilemmas, pretty early.  We know Lee Gold's crew among them.  Starting out with simple puzzle/exploration/combat dungeon play and rapidly wanting to expand that to the more character and play-acting style of roleplaying. There was a five and half year period between the game being released in Feb '74 and Aug or Sept '79, when the fad kicked off after stories about James Dallas Egbert III's disappearance and William Dear speculating to the media about steam tunnels and connections to D&D made national news.  While Law, Chaos, and Neutrality were absolutely army list "who can ally with whom", "which units can I select for my army" tools in Chainmail, and the 1974 set doesn't specify what they mean by "stance", it's also clearly not there for army list selection anymore.  The game isn't about armies.  It does control what kinds of monsters you can "lure into service" (page 12). It doesn't specify what it means in terms of character behavior and morality, but clearly by 1975 at the latest people were using it to describe moral orientation and behavior. Chaotic vs. Lawful acts as Greyhawk discusses. And given that Anderson does use it both for sides and for philosophical stance in Three Hearts and Three Lions, it seems reasonable to guess that folks were conceptualizing at least SOME of their Fighting Men (and other characters, especially Clerics) as Champions of Law against the forces of Chaos and Darkness right from the beginning.  While Gygax would make a big point of differentiating Chaos from Evil in that '76 Strategic Review article on alignments, definitely the two were closely associated at first, and re-associated in the separate D&D line starting in 1981.  I suspect the shift in conception of high level play was from multiple factors.  I'm sure you're right that tournament play was part of it.  I'm guessing that Gary & co also observed in that first 4-5 years (before the AD&D PH came out) the phenomenon that so many of us have seen in subsequent years- that, having fallen in love with the action/adventure/dungeons and monsters play of the adventuring party, most players prefer to stick with that and are not particularly interested in switching to domain-focused play when they hit 9th+ level.  They're not all that interested in taking the focus off the daring heroics of a small band of heroes and switching to wargaming, logistics and politics.  We also do see in Gary's explanations of hit points and saving throws in AD&D this conception of PCs as fortified and protected by divine forces, and it's made more explicit in "The Ongoing Campaign" on page 112 of the DMG.Gary later showed exactly this sort of progression in his own Gord the Rogue novels.  His protagonist Gord starting as a lowly street rat beggar/thief, becoming involved in greater struggles between nations and the agents of divine forces as he got higher level, and then finally directly becoming a player in and fighting against deific entities at the end of his career.</blockquote>

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