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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9411333" data-attributes="member: 7026594">Most of which assumes that you've already read and are experienced with OD&D and have a lot of contextual knowledge.  Including fundamental things like treasure placement.*It's chock full of as much terrible advice (screw over thieves at every opportunity, rather than explaining how to run them and make them fun and viable despite their terrible skill percentages and saves) as it is with good stuff (monster lair orders of battle).  Some of the rules are downright unplayable, seemingly unplaytested, and bad for your game (like the player performance grades in the training rules, or the unarmed combat rules), or EXTREMELY difficult to parse and impossible to play wholly as written (the initiative system).I love it and find it very inspirational, but it is a dumpster fire for newbie DMs to try to learn from.(*To expand on that, the treasure placement advice in the 1E DMG is often a bit polemical and stingy, directly contradicting his own practices in modules and leaving out important explicit instructions from OD&D.  If you've read OD&D and ALSO have the historical contextual knowledge that in AD&D he was reacting to stuff like Jim Ward's game, or the Dungeons & Beavers folks at Caltech with 100th level characters, his comments make more sense.  Without that knowledge, his advice often goes overboard and overcorrects.)</blockquote>