This used to drive me crazy. I know there's a line in the introduction to the DMG that invites DMs to make the game their own, but reading the Sorcerer's Scroll articles from this period, you come away with a very different impression altogether: if you aren't playing the rules exactly as they are written, you aren't playing "official AD&D." (And anything not official is almost certainly inferior, because no DM at home has as much experience as Gary Gygax, the man who invented the game.)
AD&D 1st edition was a great system, but it had plenty of legitimate and troublesome bugs. Unarmed combat, for example. But the official TSR line at the time revolved around this weird "Gygaxian infallibility" principle: rather than admit a rule was problematic, we would get some convoluted rationalization why the rule was perfectly fine. And if you didn’t buy this rationale? Well, you didn’t invent D&D, did you, so you must not know what you’re talking about.
I really hated the hypocrisy and wrong-headedness of this position. (I don't think I've actually used the word “hypocrisy” since high school.)
An important part of Dragon Magazine's mission was to present variant rules, and every month you would open up a new issue and get some get some fantastic new unofficial rules. And these new rules would often appear right next to the latest Sorcerer’s Scroll article railing against the abomination of variant rules. Even though it was well known that Gary himself actually ignored the rules much of the time and was reputedly a great improviser at the table.
Here’s an example: There’s a Sorcerer’s Scroll article that utterly lambastes the very notion of weapon specialization in AD&D as a preposterous idea! That is, preposterous until Gary and Len Lakofka introduced the concept in a later Sorcerer’s Scroll article.
As time went on, I found myself increasingly on the outside of “Official AD&D” looking in, and I was getting worn down by editorials from the AD&D dogmatists telling me my game was somehow wrong. I didn’t have a crazy set of variants -- no 50th level dwarf paladins, no umber hulk PCS. I had just picked up a few nice house rules here and there based on some Dragon Magazine articles, and found myself increasingly at odds with many of the new rules Gary was bringing into the game. I hated much of Unearthed Arcana, for example -- the new spells were great, but I thought most of the new races and classes were out-and-out broken or badly implemented.
I was actually about to jump ship to GURPS when Gary left TSR, and that kept me playing AD&D for a few more years. I understand what Gary was trying to do by banging and banging on the “Official AD&D” drum: he wanted a standardized ruleset to facilitate tournament play, and wanted to distinguish AD&D from BD&D (which was supposed to be the “anything goes” cousin.)
I just think TSR’s approach at the time was ham-handed and off-putting. I know plenty of other DMs from this period that were really turned off by the “If It’s Not Official AD&D (tm) Sanctioned Material, It’s Crap!” party line. I suspect this is a huge reason why second edition AD&D took a completely different approach to design by having a loose core rulset with a galaxy of optional add-ons.
