OK,
@Charlaquin - here's the points list. Here's what he gets wrong, IME:
Wrong. Most people - DMs at least - knew about it, but intentionally chose to ignore it.
I don’t think he was speaking specifically of DMs, and I certainly expect there were plenty of players who weren’t aware of it, especially since a lot of DMs didn’t use it. Moreover, the context of this comment is relevant. He’s talking about how this particular bit of techne was lost over time.
They did both; most commonly starting with a dungeon or two and then expanding from there as needed until suddenly it's a world - or enough of one to support a long and diverse campaign, anyway.
Maybe poor choice of phrasing here, but the broader point is to contrast a play style that was very focused on dungeon exploration to one that’s more focused on serialized storytelling.
Wrong. In the DMG Gygax points out how cool it can be if DMs connect their worlds such that characters can jump from one to another; and this was fairly common among groups where some players overlapped. But all D&D games taking place in one shared world? Hell no!
Obviously he didn’t mean that literally.
This one's true sometimes, but doesn't square with the one at 4:55.
This line is definitely odd, but again, remember that he’s trying to contextualize location-based play to an audience who may never have considered that there might be an alternative to event-based play.
Players came and went, sure, but IME there would usually be a core of two or three who stuck with a given DM.
That doesn’t contradict what he said though. Is it not true both that groups often had consistent cores and that players wouldn’t always play with the same group?
Completely wrong; and doesn't agree with the point at 3:15. Weekend-warrior games existed, no question there, but they were far from universal. Most games already worked as they do today, where you pick up next session right where you left off this one - same in-game time, place, etc. - even if the players were a bit of a rotating cast (the PCs of no-shows became party NPCs for that session)
I think he assumed this because, as he says in the video, he has experience with West Marches play, where this is often the case, and he has conflated that experience with old-school play because of other ways they are similar. At any rate, it’s not untrue that there were games played this way.
This is almost a repeat of the point at 2:58, just phrased differently. It's still wrong.
It certainly overstates the degree to which this was a thing. But is it not true that people would (sometimes) bring the same character to different DMs tables, and that things like XP and items would (sometimes) carry over between different tables? Certainly this was far from universal, but give the guy a break. He’s just recently learned that this was ever a thing at all and excited to talk about it. Can we not forgive him for making the mistake of thinking it was more common than it was? Do we even have data on how common or uncommon it was?
Seems like an extreme measure to me, but ok.
