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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 9294773" data-attributes="member: 32740">IIRC the Dragon article was also later anointed by TSR as being the official solution.  What Gary himself almost certainly did was what he thought was reasonable at any given moment - if it even came up as a problem.  This was an issue that came up mostly  because of other people's monster designs that used different dice than the d6 for surprise (d8, d10), and the monk that used percentiles (which although Gygax included in 1E wasn't so much Gygax's own design - like much of the 1E combat rules in general).  Gygax - again IIUC - tended to run his own game very loosely, using a surprising amount of DM fiat, and not following many of the complicated and detailed combat rules from 1E.  In other words, he ran his game more like original D&D, not 1E.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Anyone who claims to play their 1E game strictly btb is most assuredly not.  There are just way, way too many bits that REQUIRE an interpretation, a house rule, because they are too complicated, too cumbersome, too out of step with the modern style of play, or just plain contradictory.  ADDICT is still 6 pages even after you remove all the citations, and as pointed out, still made some interpretations that not everyone agrees with.  If nothing else it makes it quite clear that the 1E combat rules as a whole were definitely not playtested (not well enough anyway, IF they were really tested even to a minimally acceptable degree - which seems outrageously unlikely).  The section titled "COMBAT" in the DMG is 23 pages - and people STILL argue the details of it vehemently and repeatedly after nearly 50 years.  There is no universal and accepted solution.  There can't be.On the other hand, anyone who simply says they TRY to stick to RAW is going to be as close (or closer) as anyone claiming they truly do.  Besides, the philosophy in 1E was never about bullying people to stick to the written rules (as WotC would later tend to do, following the same philosophy they established long before D&D with MtG) - it was about sticking to the rules as presented by your DM.  Warnings were even given specifically to DM's to NOT put up with players ever trying to quote rules at you.  It's true that part of Gygax's motivation in creating 1E was to provide a single set of rules for use IN TOURNAMENTS, but that's because OD&D was unrestrained in leaving expansion and alteration of the game's rules to the DM.  Two OD&D DM's running the same adventure in a tournament were sure to be WILDLY different.  1E, despite it's failings in being itself easy-to-sort out and consistent, did at least provide a more unified and detailed approach to the rules that would be needed in tournament play.</blockquote>

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