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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5828449" data-attributes="member: 4937">"Since we used the "Good Hits, Bad Misses" article for crits and fumbles from Dragon #39, there was a chance of weapon breakage on a nat 1."This is one of the most common house rules ever, and it is IME typical of 1e AD&D in two ways.a) First, it was an optional table rule from Dragon that was assumed to be in force at a large number of otherwise disparate tables.b) Secondly, the above is a widespread house ruling based on the optional table rule from Dragon which is interesting to me in that most people using this rule both arrived at it independently and weren't and aren't aware that this is not the way the rule worked as written.The 'Good Hits, Bad Misses' article actually had little to do with natural 1's and natural 20's, and instead described the chance of a critical hit (or fumble) in what amounted to a variation of the 3e confirmation roll.   Namely, the chance of a fumble was 1% per 1 you missed the to hit roll by (frex, if you needed a 6 to hit, and rolled a 3, there was a 3% chance of a fumble).   Many people using the charts however, never read the article.   I can remember talking with another DM with 10 years about the rules for something, and him admitting he'd never read that part of the DMG.   I would say most groups didn't throughly read the rules, and instead, relied on truncated versions of the rules that seemed to them to be intuitive and easy in play.I say 'most' though.   You could try to say that the 'old school' style was ignoring rules and creating the game you wanted, but there were also old school DM's that liked to adhere pretty closely to the rules as written.   I would say that if you wanted to call something 'old school', it would be Bill Cavalier's take on things: "Does this game have Dragons?  Does this game have Dungeons?   Then I want to play this game."   I remember having arguments about single rulings that got really heated.   I don't remember anyone ever saying thinking that there was one right way to play.   People could like Chocolate and Strawberry.   Now people are a bit more 'set in their ways'.   I'd say 'comes with age', except that you see it from the younger generation as well.</blockquote>

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