Though its hardly the only one, if you look at the more popular games (and of course its hard to even make a statement about some broad types of games since they vary so much internally in how much emphasis they put on it. But, as an example, if someone wanted to tell me it wasn't a major part of RQ or most of even the CoD, I'd kind of laugh at them.)
A huge number of TTRPGs include significantly amounts of combat rules, sometimes with little regard to whether the game needs them, benefits from them, or exactly how those rules feed into their central play loops. White Wolf WoD being the iconic example where the dev's best intents about what kind of game they wanted to foster ran headlong into people trying to play the combat/superheroics-laded game their rules actually supported.
Ryuutama is an alternate example -- I think most people play it as a light-hearted travelogue game, but it is still funny how much combat rules they still felt compelled to include.
TSR ruined D&D when they switched their marketing from adult wargamers to adolescent boys.
And yes, it was deliberate, Jim Ward confirmed it.
I don't know about ruined, but I'll wholeheartedly agree that the initial game* was a significantly more concise, coherent, and purpose-fit game than what came afterwards. If TSR had wanted to keep it a purer representation of what was initially intended, I think it would stand alongside
Chainmail or
Cavaliers and Roundheads as well-designed, niche-market products.
*or at least the game that people at the early playtest tables got to experience, and in Gary's head as he wrote the LBBs. We'll leave the editing/communication issues therein for another day
The rulebooks were eccentrically organized back in the day, and lots of rules were scattered throughout the books, rather than being placed together and explained clearly, as they typically are today in games like OSE.
The state of the art for presentation and clarity has advanced a lot since the late 1970s, to be sure, due in part to the desktop publishing revolution, but if it's not Gary's fault that plenty of people missed some or all of what he was saying, whose fault is it? Even if it's unfair to expect the old books to be OSE-level in clarity, they could certainly have been more clear than they were.
Way more people have told me "we just ignored reaction and morale" than have said "we never found those rules."
IMO, the desperate search for 'fault' in all this is the bugaboo of these discussions. The game had plenty of rules that, when followed, created a tighter, more cohesive game*. Plenty of people did not end up playing with these rules. It could be that they didn't know they were there. It could be that they did not realize why they were important. It could well be that they knew they were there, that they served a purpose (and what it was), and still said, 'this isn't something I am interested in doing.'
*which many people who ended up playing may or may not have enjoyed playing.
People who categorically don't eat spicy food should either be able to produce a medical diagnosis that elicits sympathy, or should be ashamed to eat in public and actively working to overcome their deficiency.
I'm not going to get upset about this one. However, it does lead me to another (probably not-so-)unpopular opinion: Every social circle has a 'that guy' who treats their love of spicy food as a badge of honor, wants everyone to know how much they like spice, will get into spicy food eating competitions at the drop of a hat, etc. That person may genuinely love spicy food; may be the best at handling spicy food amongst that social circle; and that person may truly be exciting, interesting, and worthy of reverence. Clause two of that sentence, however, is never the cause of clause three.
I sometimes think they the social situation of late antiquity - maybe 400-700 - would make for good gaming. The empire is still an active memory and even survives and thrives very far off. (Boxed set! Epic road trip!) Up close, it’s all scrounging for solutions and conflicting claims with the PCs in the midst of it. Do you want to get Merovingians? Because this is how you get Merovingians.
