TSR Why would anyone want to play 1e?

[Tesral]

Sure, absolutely.

Gary's fool's errand of trying to define everything makes some sense in the context of how at the time he was writing AD&D TSR was making a bunch of cash from tournament play and they wanted to standardize tournament refereeing more. And how he got continual calls and requests for rules clarifications. He could have stuck by his original guns and told people they needed to define it for themselves, but likely tournament play was a factor which decided him in favor of defining things more clearly.

Of course, once he decided to try to cut Dave out of royalties, writing a bunch more rules became a way to try to differentiate AD&D as a different game from the one Dave's contract gave him royalties for.

I met Gygax once. He was an naughty word. You cannot standardize RPGs. You can do that for chess, even Monopoly. The games are played inside a given box. RPGs by definition have no box. They tried again with The RPG society what ever it was called (I don't remember,), and Pathfinder with their Pathfinder Society. Building a box around an open environment.

I do rememeber how the needs of the tourment play twisted the rules of the game from as written. And how they kept having to patch the box as people found the holes and exploited them. I had tourmenment players in my game once in a while and they were infurating. They could cite rules verbatum, but could not ROLEplay.