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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 9461756" data-attributes="member: 32740">I actually started writing a thing a while back that I titled, "AD&D: How This S*** Works," to simply explain in clearer, more concise wording, what the AD&D rules are trying to say regarding major topics.  1E, by Gygax's own admission, was written in a stream-of-consciousness style.  It explains why there actually AREN'T EVEN ANY CHAPTERS in the 1E rule books.  It explains why rules governing one topic are too often spread here and there throughout the books instead of being gathered all in one place for clarity and easier reference.  It often isn't until you DO gather rules together like they really should be that you start noticing contradictions and inconsistencies (and explains why those contradictions and inconsistencies didn't get fixed in the first place before being published).  It's why people keep noticing rules they never noticed before every time they do a dedicated read-through of the 1E rules, or maybe just happen to open a particular page and a sentence from a particular paragraph suddenly rocks their world and they start to question things they THOUGHT they knew about the game.There's no SECRET rules, and it wasn't written to intentionally confuse anyone.  It's just very imperfect writing, imperfect editing (in a genre of writing that calls for really REALLY brilliant editing to begin with), and 5 decades of people repeating misinterpretations since publication.  1E is a game that will therefore inherently fight against anybody new trying to come in and just "get it" on a single reading.  People play 1E for decades, all the while thinking they're doing things as-written, only to realize they had it wrong since they started, so you're not the first.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /></blockquote>

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