I’ve been a GM for *mumble* years, having started in junior high. As editions have come and gone, my groups have stuck with 1st edition. I own almost everything ever published for 1e, in addition to the core books for everything that followed (and preceded) it. Yet no set of rules can ever cover all of the circumstances that players can come up with.
I spent my working career in IT, and my favorite part of that is solving intensely intricate and technical complicated problems, breaking them down to their component parts, and truly understanding where things went wrong. I come from a background of 20 years of full-contact sword-and-shield combat (the SCA). The SCA included a fair grounding in an eclectic range of medieval history as well. Perhaps it’s that combined background that makes me want to puzzle out the intent of various strings of Gygaxian prose, and play in a universe where we have answers when characters want to do something that the rules don’t cover. And I’ve had the good fortune to have found good players who like the same thing (or at least put up with me).
Rule systems have to work. One problem with AD&D is that even when there is a system, gaps need to be filled in to make it usable. Or the wording is contradictory, and yet more components have to be inferred. How can we answer those question within the context of 1st edition?
My intent here is to document some of those efforts we’ve developed over the years to create a universe that has a specific system for how to solve all of a characters’ persistent questions. Life is complicated, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find solutions.