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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9738703" data-attributes="member: 7026594">I was going to say, "or a DM who had been running OD&D already for years", which is basically what the 1E books are written assuming.Yes, you've hit on it.  It was a huge thing in wargames.  The hobby wargame community (especially miniatures gamers, somewhat less so board-wargamers who could play Avalon Hill stuff off the shelf if they didn't want to make tweaks) was absolutely rife with house-rulings, modifications, and amateur design.Gygax's classified ads in the Players Seeking Players section of AH's periodical The General included a note "will collaborate on game design", and were not unusual in doing so.  As post-Playing at the World research turned up, the Chainmail wargame was in substantial part an iteration on and expansion of a <a href="https://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2016/01/a-precursor-to-chainmail-fantasy.html" target="_blank">little two page amateur Middle Earth wargame designed by a college student named Leonard Patt</a> which was played at a gaming convention in 1970, but the rules for which got circulated a little bit in fanzines.The Diplomacy zine fandom and play by mail community of the 50s-60s was also overflowing with homebrew variants with new rules, homebrew maps and settings.  Including Middle Earth-based ones, <a href="https://osrgrimoire.blogspot.com/2019/11/od-dragons.html" target="_blank">a fanzine for which was where Gary's first color-coded and mock-latin named dragon descriptions appeared</a>, years before Chainmail or D&D.This was indeed the norm and the context in which D&D was originally published, expecting the customer base to all be hobbyist wargamers accustomed to designing rules and scenarios.  Which is part of why OD&D gives examples of dungeon concepts but  no pre-written scenario or dungeon.  It tells us that the DM has to design their own dungeon from scratch.Here's the famous afterword/final notes from the original boxed rules:[ATTACH=full]415542[/ATTACH]</blockquote>

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