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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 3916404" data-attributes="member: 32740">Also true and easy to forget.  The release order of the the big three AD&D books was MM first, then PH, then the DMG with a great deal of time between.  The AD&D MM is copyright 1977-1978, the PH 1978 and the DMG... 1979.I'd suggest that the early development of D&D was also uneven, chaotic, even directionless.  There was no "design goal" involved.  They were professional game designers not because they'd formally studied somehow, somewhere for such a thing, and met in committees and task teams to forge new rules, but simply because they got PAID for pursuing their hobby.  They added to the rules and used whatever they wanted simply because they'd developed the various bits and pieces for their OWN uses and figured that they'd be able to sell them to others.That was partly true for the PH (as seen in the inclusion of the monk, the bard, and psionics - the latter two being appendices) but I understand that Gygax assembled its content more as the way HE ran the game.  It is much more coordinated and organized.  The DMG wound up being in part a catch-all for a lot of other material including (as has been established) stuff that he, even as the author, neither needed or used.  And, of course, he wrote a lot of text to somehow tie it together.  All the more reason to wonder whether his brief statements about keeping the entire book "secret" may have been hyperbole or merely careless commentary.Clearly people DO have strikingly different experiences with whether the DMG was truly thought to be "secret", and whether anyone in ones group TRIED to keep it that way and how successful they might have been at that.  I guess I'm still just having difficulty with anyone asserting one way or the other that no matter WHAT Gygax wrote he had clear, unambiguous intentions that EVERYTHING in the DMG was sensitive, secret material to be kept from players.  Practical experience shows that some of it was necessary and used by players on a regular basis - saving throws, initiative (or not<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />), etc.  Hell, I believe such tables as saving throws were printed on the OUTSIDE panels of the official 1E DM screens for players to see (though sadly I no longer have one to actually verify that recollection).</blockquote>

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