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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarf Zagyg" data-source="post: 8299529" data-attributes="member: 7023840">That's true, but also not the reason (or not the sole reason) for the confluence of written and unwritten rules (or, as some might say, rules and norms) in early D&D.D&D came from a very insular, small, and most importantly ... hobbyist community (wargaming, adult who still gamed). There was a lot of collaboration, borrowing, and DIY involved. Early D&D (and RPGs in general) assumed a base level of knowledge and familiarity. In a way, we can compare this to the "rules" in a cookbook. If you are not familiar with cooking at all, some cookbooks can seem intimidating or like they're skipping necessary steps. What does it mean to "boil water." How do you know if butter is browned? When it says to saute the vegetables, what does that mean? And so on. Most cookbooks assume some level of basic cooking knowledge (luckily, we have the internet now to answer most of those questions). It was the same with early TTRPGs. They were games written by an intense group of hobbyists, originally for an other hobbyists, with the assumption that you would both be able to understand the background of this material, but that you would also be altering the rules as needed (DIY).The irony is that the complaints some people had later (and the infamous "Dungeons and Beavers" column by Gygax) was not because of any need for actual rules standardization was desired in the overall community- far from it. Instead, if you contrast what was said earlier (with the explicit statements that the rules were not the end-all, be-all!) and the evolution of TSR along with the lawsuits, you see that the so-called rules standardization was simply about ensuring all the money stayed with TSR. It wasn't that there was something magical about RAW; instead, it was about keeping tables from making their own rules, and more importantly, keeping 3PP from devising rules that people would buy.It's not the story of game design. It's the story of capitalism.</blockquote>

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