Remathilis
Legend
The game hasn't been played like that since the 80s. The rise of plot-based adventures rather than dungeon crasher play. You can argue Dragonlance started the trend, but it was fully in play in 2nd edition. There was just a terrible mishmash of the heroic adventure design and Gary's "11 foot pole because 10' is too short" rules. Since then, D&D rules have moved toward rules that accommodate the adventures they have been designing for 30 years.Just because the game isn't about those things anymore doesn't mean they weren't fun. If that were true, we'd all be playing the same thing. Present game design is not always better, and different preferences are good.
I know that there is a large OSR movement, but I doubt that many people played the way Gary assumed (multiple simultaneous PCs, weeks of IRL downtime to heal, dozens of henchmen and hirelings, and judicious use of everything to avoid fights, since the main source of xp was gold) and instead played like modules assumed (1 PC at a time, small to medium groups of PCs with limited npc help, healing at the rate of plot, encounters designed to be fought, etc).