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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8348984" data-attributes="member: 82106">I guess we will have to agree to disagree to a degree. I'm pretty sure that D&amp;D in the group I first gamed with started up purely by virtue of someone in our Boy Scout troop finding a copy and buying it. There was a 'hobby shop' (game store) a few miles away, and by around 1974 I would go there now and then and use my allowance/paper route money to buy some Avalon Hill game or other. So did a few of the other boys. One of them bought D&amp;D, possibly there were rumors going around about how it was some cool new thing, I'm not sure.Anyway, the guy who ran it had Chainmail, I guess he thought he had to buy that too. The upshot is, there is a really large paucity of actual rules for how to play, like almost none at all. Even if you read between the lines there's no such thing as a solid initiative rule (witness, J Eric Holmes' cleanup of the D&amp;D rules includes a totally different rule/process for running the combat loop). So, I KIND OF agree with you, there were some logical choices, assuming you had Chainmail, but they were not cast in stone. The first group I played with did it pretty similarly to what I expect Gygax did, based on what is in 1e and assuming that codifies his practices. OTOH I then played with a bunch of other groups that had many other interpretations, and they all thought they were 'canonical'! These were all Army guys mostly, so they probably started playing in various places all over the world at military bases (D&amp;D was big there in the 70s, something I've rarely heard discussed). Our own group that I ran used the rules from Holmes Basic, until 1979 when we adopted the 1e combat rules.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 8348984, member: 82106"] I guess we will have to agree to disagree to a degree. I'm pretty sure that D&D in the group I first gamed with started up purely by virtue of someone in our Boy Scout troop finding a copy and buying it. There was a 'hobby shop' (game store) a few miles away, and by around 1974 I would go there now and then and use my allowance/paper route money to buy some Avalon Hill game or other. So did a few of the other boys. One of them bought D&D, possibly there were rumors going around about how it was some cool new thing, I'm not sure. Anyway, the guy who ran it had Chainmail, I guess he thought he had to buy that too. The upshot is, there is a really large paucity of actual rules for how to play, like almost none at all. Even if you read between the lines there's no such thing as a solid initiative rule (witness, J Eric Holmes' cleanup of the D&D rules includes a totally different rule/process for running the combat loop). So, I KIND OF agree with you, there were some logical choices, assuming you had Chainmail, but they were not cast in stone. The first group I played with did it pretty similarly to what I expect Gygax did, based on what is in 1e and assuming that codifies his practices. OTOH I then played with a bunch of other groups that had many other interpretations, and they all thought they were 'canonical'! These were all Army guys mostly, so they probably started playing in various places all over the world at military bases (D&D was big there in the 70s, something I've rarely heard discussed). Our own group that I ran used the rules from Holmes Basic, until 1979 when we adopted the 1e combat rules. [/QUOTE]

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