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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6231755" data-attributes="member: 4937">Quite often.  The drowning rules that permeate the text are incredibly difficult to apply and don't answer very basic questions of player interaction.   And they are almost certainly completely different from probably a dozen different sets of drowning rules that could be cited from published material.   Gygax was fond of ad hocing finely grained percentage changes based on dozen or so factors to yield an 'answer', and this text follows that pattern.  To handle problems of character competency, 1e ad hoc'd in all sorts of unofficial rules.  This is most evident in the various mini-systems it created for handling whether you were caught in a trap.  Depending on the writer you'd see either a percentage chance (straight up luck), a save vs. petrification (presumably an implied alertness check?), a save vs. rod/staff/wand (a pseudo-reflex save?), or an ability check (roll less than your dexterity on a d20, a proto-skill check).  In some cases it wasn't mentioned in the text, so the implication is that you don't avoid the trap (no save!) but many groups had by that time ended up adopting one of the above as a house rule (often without being aware they'd done so) and so assumed the ruling applied whether it was mentioned or not.Of course they were, and rightfully so.   From the player's perspective, there is no difference between a formal, canonical rule out of a rule book, an unwritten house rule, and an immediate ad hoc ruling.  This is easily seen if you are dealing with new players that don't know the rules.   Once they encounter it, it goes into their library of expectations about the game world from which they base their propositions on.  It's an inherently unfair world if the same proposition has two completely different resolution systems in what is from the fiction a basically identical context.  At that point, from the player perspective, there might as well be no rules and the game is trivialized to 'BS/boot lick the DM'.</blockquote>

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