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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sacrosanct" data-source="post: 9738151" data-attributes="member: 15700">A couple months ago <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/why-would-anyone-want-to-play-1e.713641/" target="_blank">I posted a thread</a> about why would anyone want to play RAW 1e, and gave reasons. As a follow up to that, and after several more sessions and talking with friends about OD&D, I realized why I loved 1e, and still do.Hint: It's to NOT play it RAW.A little context: We were talking about how OD&D was impossible to learn and play unless you had someone who already knew how to play teach you.  After all, it was written with the assumption that  you'd be using rules from Chainmail and knew how to play it.  1e was a big advancement, but was still extremely difficult to learn, especially for new players.But that leads me to this thread, and why 1e was actually great. Because of those flaws, (and probably because rpgs were still pretty new), we all just played how we wanted. Made up our own houserules. Ignored a bunch of other ones.  And it was glorious. Rules lawyers existed, but they seemed much fewer in number than now (or the past 25 years). And not just rules lawyers, but players looking to see what the rule is for something they wanted to do. Over the past few decades, as more people became familiar with rpgs and as the rulebooks became easier to comprehend, I've seen a lot less of winging things or making up your own worlds, rules, or features like classes or monsters.So it sounds weird to say, but 1e's complicated and hard to follow rules was a good thing because it gave us more freedom to make the game our own. Easier to make it how our table preferred to play. And boy did we. It's one reason why I'm glad Shadowdark is so popular, because it shows that we weren't all just outliers. Rulings over rules can, and is, a fun playstyle for a lot of people. So....1e, take a back handed compliment <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Edit edited the title for clarity, because the sarcasm didn't come through. the original thread was "why would anyone want to play 1e RAW" as a sarcastic title, meaning, "1e RAW is really bad I can't see how anyone would want to play it." This title was a mirror of that, but apparently the sarcasm didn't carry over. The intent was "why wouldn't you want to play 1e NOT RAW, because it's great!".  Apparently that didn't carry over well.</blockquote>

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