NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadence" data-source="post: 6178886" data-attributes="member: 6701124">The game clearly isn't designed for equal story telling is it?  The DM is set-up to be different.  But that doesn't mean it isn't about shared story telling.   The 1e DMG says that the world should be modified as needed for the enjoyment of the players (ignoring die rolls, stealing treasure if you realize later you gave them too much, not having people die just because that's what happened in the game, random lightning bolts to control troublesome players, etc..)... and with experience, doing it on the fly is ok. He says multiple times that the DM should if it is needed to keep the campaign happily rolling along.   If your world and encounter design is perfect (an impossible task?), then of course it wouldn't be needed.Why have all the world animation rules? "In fact, what I have attempted is to cram everything vital to the game into this book, so that you will be as completely equipped as possible to face the ravenous packs of players lurking in the shadows, waiting to pounce upon the unwary referee and devour him or her at the first opportunity." (1e DMG, pg. 9).Why does having a list of the basic rules of how the shared world works contradict storytelling?   Isn't it helpful so that every action doesn't bog down deciding what should happen or turn into a disagreement about what the effect is?In the 1e DMG Gygax compares D&D to games with finite fixed rules (like Chess) and makes it clear that's not what D&D is.   What does why people went crazy over Pacman have to do with why they went crazy over D&D?  The 70s had people going crazy over lots of things that were unrelated.I started playing in 1981 in an older group in the midwest that had started playing when OD&D was being rolled out.  As far as I could tell, none of them shared your view of the game or the reason for its popularity.   It would be interesting to see how common the two views were among players in that first generation.  (Anyone have some good quotes from the Strategic Review or early Dragon issues?)Regardless of their flaws, it seems strange to me that the written material in the core books of the first two editions of AD&D wouldn't be pretty definitive in terms of describing what AD&D is.Or was OD&D relatively popular and refined enough that it should be more defining of the spirit of early D&D than, say, 1e and Moldvay/Cook?</blockquote>

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