I know Urbanski is a “whole work” in himself, and I only listen to see what he’s pissed about to see if he’s actually got a correct gripe.

However, Jeffro says, “I know role-players WANT to see “rule zero” within the AD&D rules. But the fact is… it is just not there.” except that it is there; I just posted it.

I would not have called it “rule 0” back in the 70s or 80s, but the guys I knew were straying from official rules because of the hot mess that was 0D&D.

Hot Mess

When I say hot mess, I mean disorganization. If you played with the 3 LBBs, and you wanted to know a monster’s alignment, you had to use Vol I Men and Magic to get their alignment. For this example, let’s pretend you want an encounter for elves:

Volume I: Men and Magic

Volume II: Monsters & Treasures

Then and go to Volume II: Monsters & Treasures to get Number Appearing, Armor Class, Move in Inches, Hit Dice, % in lair, and type or amount of treasure.

Please note that at the bottom of the table with armor class and hit dice, it informs you

“Attack/Defense capabilities versus normal men are simply a matter of allowing one roll as a man-type for every hit die, with any bonuses being given to only one of the attacks, i.e. a Troll would attack six times, once with a +3 added to the die roll. (Combat is detailed in Vol. III.)”

Volume III: The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures

Now you go to the third book, which tells you, “Melee can be conducted with the combat table given in Volume I or by the CHAINMAIL system,”

Volume I: Men and Magic

So you go back to Vol I which tells you, “All attacks which score hits do 1-6 points damage unless otherwise noted.”

Volume II: Monsters & Treasures

So to determine what’s noted, hop back to Vol II and read in the monster description!

And almost at the end, you see that they do 2-7 (1d6+1) damage with a magic weapon, so otherwise, 1d6.

Volume I: Men and Magic

And that damage was against Hit Dice, which in Volume I tells you

Dice for Accumulative Hits (Hit Dice): This indicates the number of dice which are rolled in order to determine how many hit points a character can take. Plusses are merely the number of pips to add to the total of all dice rolled not to each die.

---

Note about pips:

On dice, pips are small dots on each face of a common six-sided die. These pips are typically arranged in patterns denoting the numbers one through six. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pip_(counting)

---

This was a polyhedral dice based game, as four sided dice are mentioned in the elf listing, as one example (“For every 50 Elves encountered there will be one of above-normal capabilities. Roll a four-sided die for level of fighting and a six-sided die for level of magical ability,”)

Of course, there were also 4 supplements, so if you wanted to use a Type VI demon, you had to go to Supplement III Eldritch Wizardry.

If you bought J. Eric Holmes’ Basic D&D (1977), you saw the introduction of the organized stat block:

But when the AD&D Monster Manual came out in 1978, all the information was grouped together in a vertical stat block, like this:

And there was more text afterward. The elf listing is a little more than a whole page.

Rewrite Sorely Needed

AD&D may have been to swindle Arneson out of royalties, but a rewrite was sorely needed.

Gygax Even Owned Some Of The Mess He Made

A lot of Gygax’s apparent heavy-handedness came from the mess he made in D&D and he owned it (at least some of it). He even talks about it in the section on Magic Items

PLACEMENT OF MAGIC ITEMS

Just as it is important to use forethought and consideration in placing valuable metals and other substances with monsters or otherwise hiding them in dungeon or wilderness, the placement of magic items is a serious matter. Thoughtless placement of powerful magic items has been the ruination of many a campaign. Not only does this cheapen what should be rare and precious, it gives player characters undeserved advancement and empowers them to become virtual rulers of all they survey. * This is in part the fault of this writer, who deeply regrets not taking the time and space in D&D to stress repeatedly the importance of moderation. * Powerful magic items were shown, after all, on the tables, and a chance for random discovery of these items was given, so the uninitiated DM cannot be severely faulted for merely following what was set before him or her in the rules. Had the whole been prefaced with an admonition to use care and logic in placement or random discovery of magic items, had the intent, meaning, and spirit of the game been more fully explained, much of the give-away aspect of such campaigns would have willingly been squelched by the DMs. The sad fact is, however, that this was not done, so many campaigns are little more than a joke, something that better DMs jape at and ridicule — rightly so on the surface — because of the foolishness of player characters with astronomically high levels of experience and no real playing skill. These god-like characters boast and strut about with retinues of ultra-powerful servants and scores of mighty magic items, artifacts, relics adorning them as if they were Christmas trees decked out with tinsel and ornaments. Not only are such “Monty Haul” games a crashing bore for most participants, they are a headache for their DMs as well, for the rules of the game do not provide anything for such play — no reasonable opponents, no rewards, nothing! The creative DM can, of course, develop a game which extrapolates from the original to allow such play, but this is a monumental task to accomplish with even passable results, and those attempts I have seen have been uniformly dismal.

Another nadir of Dungeon Mastering is the “killer-dungeon” concept. These campaigns are a travesty of the role-playing adventure game, for there is no development and identification with carefully nurtured player personae. In such campaigns, the sadistic referee takes unholy delight in slaughtering endless hordes of hapless player characters with unavoidable death traps and horrific monsters set to ambush participants as soon as they set foot outside the door of their safe house. Only a few of these “killer dungeons” survive to become infamous, however, as their participants usually tire of the idiocy after a few attempts at enjoyable gaming. Some lucky ones manage to find another, more reasonable, campaign; but others, not realizing the perversion of their DM’s campaign, give up adventure gaming and go back to whatever pursuits they followed in their leisure time before they tried D&D.

Killer-dungeons (like the Tomb of Horrors which was by Gygax) were not supposed to be the norm. So why would Gygax write one? This was also an emerging game. In the DMG, Mike Carr’s Foreward is dated 16 May 1979, just 5 years after D&D was a thing. You can look back now and see all the mistakes (like gender-based strength score limitations), but the reality is that at this time, tournament play was a way to show people how to play a game that was still in its infancy.

Freeform = House Rules

But when you say,

So play OD&D or really anything other than AD&D if you like freeform gaming. That’s all there is to it.

I had a player who loved drow elves, so I let him play one, because of the info in the D-series modules (and Fiend Folio). Why? Here’s the heavy-handed Gygax on monsters as player characters:

“The rest is up to you, for when all is said and done, it is your world, and your players must live in it with their characters”

So, by allowing a PC to have a drow character, by your claim, I wasn’t playing AD&D, and yet there, on page 21 of the DMG, I was allowed to.

More Wiggle Room

AD&D was lethal. I let players start at level 3. What you call free form, we called House Rules. And we house ruled as we saw fit.

While Gygax did warn people of straying too far from his proscribed rules, but he also listed four methods for generating ability scores – in the DMG – so the DM could pick the method they thought best.

On the topic of strength bonus to missile weapon damage:

“To do so, he or she must obtain the special weapon or weapons, and this is within the realm of your adjudication as DM as to where and how it will be obtained, and how much cost will be involved.”

Again, letting the DM adjucate.

Jeffro states

The conventional wisdom on AD&D is that it formalized the rules specifically for tournament play only and that peoples’ home campaigns functioned under “rule zero” no differently than the OD&D rules did.

This is of course a complete hallucination

Do you want me to keep posting all the wiggle room allowances from the DMG?

I do think Urbanski is too far right, but I can’t get on board the Jeffro train, because he’s painting Gygax as some heavy-handed tyrant where you played it his way or it wasn’t AD&D. He’s pulling a few quotes out of context.

And Jeffro is wrong.