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: 6179113" data-attributes="member: 6701124">But that was the game's rule book by the co-creator of the game saying how it should be done in his view.... not just "someone suggesting cheating." 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?  Did the 1st generation of players substantially change their view of the idea of the game with the advent of AD&D?  Or was AD&D meant to capture what those players were already doing? I haven't meant to imply that game play wasn't important or that storytelling was even the larger goal of the two. But I think the DMG makes it clear it is a part.  I'm claiming that both the writings of Gygax in the DMG and my memories of how one group from the first generation of players approached things had both the rules side and the fudging-storytelling side as being important for the game.  I'm even good with the game play being noticeably more important than the storytelling aspect in the early versions. That seems reasonable to me. But doesn't explain why neither Gygax in his writing nor the first generation players I knew personally seemed to treat the game solely the way you describe (without the sandbox, do it on the fly, change what you had written down, incorporate player ideas) when it seemed to make things work better.  Certainly by 1981 the younger group in my own age range that I played with was pretty cooperative in its world building and resolution, did lots of things unplanned on the fly, and would have thought the storytelling idea described a big part of what we were playing (if anyone had described it to us in those words).   We treated the D&D rules very differently than those of (the rigid) Star Fleet Battles a few years down the road.I'm fine with not being true to D&D's true roots... it just seems that you were presenting how you've always viewed it and claiming it should be definitive (because all games would have been viewed in the same way at the time - in spite of any recollections or writings to the contrary?)I don't understand why it needs to be so binary.  Why does the game need to be about only one of game play or storytelling?  Why does a game where storytelling is an important part need to be pure storytelling?  Why couldn't people have conceived it as something between the pure rules driven game and the pure storytelling in the beginning?I'm a handful of years too late to the scene to know how it was viewed originally... so I think it would be interesting to get the views of a variety of others who started in the mid 70s and to go through the old Strategic Review and Dragon issues from back then to see the range of views at the beginning.</blockquote>

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