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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Indaarys" data-source="post: 9198928" data-attributes="member: 7040941">It seems to me people are just reading into the apologetic "we know this is incomplete" commentary what they want to hear.When I read this, particularly the quote Jagga posted, I'm inclined to focus on the consideration that what was in the book as being the essentials. That contextually implies that there was a pretty heavy handed value judgement given to whatever was missing as being non-essential to running the game. So even if we accept the premise that the improv game was supposed to be there, its status as non-essential speaks volumes about its prevalance, especially in comparison to modern examples. In modern games, the improv game roughly speaking accounts for anywhere from 40-90% of the playtime. In no sense of the word could you ever say the improv game is "non-essential" in these games, unless one is just deferring to the oral tradition (in which case its an impasse and we need to debate that instead). So when we look at ODND, see that the improv game, whether it was meant to be there or not, is deemed non-essential, that then calls into question how much prevalance it should have had. It couldn't have been comparable to a modern game, because then that contradicts the non-essential wording. Unless, of course, the designers were just full of it and were just hoping nobody would notice that they're basically pandering by saying they totally meant for XYZ to all be there after the fact and after people have tried to play. Perhaps its not charitable, but it does firmly establish the tradition of DND devs being, well, full of it. <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="🤷‍♂️" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f937-2642.png" title="Man shrugging    :man_shrugging:" data-shortname=":man_shrugging:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" /></blockquote>

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