Advanced Dungeons & Dragons may be the perfect game. It has everything that it needs in three relatively small volumes. Given the present day explosion in cost, word count, and incompleteness leading to splat books this is an achievement. An achievement that has been unrecognized for decades until the advent of Jeffry Johnson and the BROSR.
Everyone loves a house rule. I’ve done that with the parking garage in Monopoly. Maximum hit points? Why not? Skills? Why not? Read the whole book? Why not correct deficiencies that may or may not be there? Or play as written?
Jeffro Johnson and BROSR ‘why notted’ playing AD&D as written.
As an aside, the roleplaying industry can be remarkably dysfunctional. I’ve seen evidence of people being able to work together for years, then things being torn apart for incredibly petty reasons. Sometimes it is about money, other times…
I had a friend who worked in the wargaming industry. Well, maybe an industry at one time, more like a hobby today. This person was constantly being nickeled and dimed. Constantly denigrated. Just dealing with a toxic brew of people who would steal from you for the sheer heck of it. This friend had a friend who was in the mob. The mob friend was continually shocked at the sheer pettiness and lack of morals from the people working in the gaming industry. I don’t think the roleplaying industry is far behind.
I believe that Gary Gygax developed AD&D so there could be a rock solid foundation for tournament play. He wanted for people to be able to gather and play through games at conventions without having to worry about a bunch of house rules. You cannot have a truly competitive tournament scene without having a shared and solid set of rules. Dungeons & Dragons could not provide that solid rule set. It was scattered through multiple volumes and house ruled to the breaking point. This was great for home groups, but not for tournaments.
The thing is he changed enough stuff, so that in his mind it was all of his design work. He may have been right because he did a lot of the heavy lifting in the design work for Dungeons & Dragons. The thing is he wouldn’t have been doing this design work if he had not been sparked by David Arneson.
Credit is a tricky thing. But it is not an honest argument if you are selling a version of a game as Advanced while denying one of the original creators any credit. If that was the case, then make it an entirely new game with a new name.
So, support of tournament play? Probably. Dick move? Yeah. The litigation and busted relationships that followed point to this. These things were going to make enough to share but no one seemed to appreciate that at the time.
AD&D was translated into multiple languages. Sold through the roof for a while. It became the backbone for tournament play. But its company, TSR, and its creator, Gary Gygax, couldn’t leave well enough alone. They kept amending and fracturing their rules set.
The Players Handbook (PH) had all of the needed rules for Players. It had what Players needed, but segregated the rules for how all of these actions might be adjudicated to the Dunegon Masters Guide (DMG). This bifurcation led to some player dissatisfaction, but I can understand Gygax’s reasoning. How do you cut down on rules lawyering? You put that stuff in a book that only the Dungeon Master has access to.
These two books and the Monster Manual (MM) were all you needed for decades of play. You did not need a campaign or sourcebooks, because the campaign was already baked into a series of random charts at the back of the DMG. That was it.
So what did they do? They started selling campaign settings.
Gary Gygax ran a Greyhawk campaign, but it was partially mapped and mostly had some notes. That campaign resulted from player interactions. He adjudicated results and kept taking notes. He did the same with his Castle Greyhawk dungeon. It was mostly developed in play. The Greyhawk campaign came out with beautiful maps that had some of what Gygax had mapped. The rest of the maps were made up to fill out the space available.
They sold some expansion hard covers for AD&D. Deities and Demigods was not an essential book. It was a nice to have. It was the same for the subsequent Fiend Folio. It had more monsters, but it also had updated encounter charts which brought it in line with the original AD&D books. But they kept going…
Unearthed Arcana was a money grab from TSR and Gygax. The company was in dire straits financially and he had to do something. So he released a book that expanded AD&D, which was ill-playtested and somewhat incoherent. This would be bad enough. But in releasing this book he fractured his rule base. What rules do you use for the tournament now? Have they been translated into this other country’s language. You’ve rendered the entire reason for AD&D moot.
[My advice is to stop with those first five books.]
When TSR released the second edition of AD&D they fractured their fan base again. There were fewer people playing the subsequent edition. Third edition brought more people in because of the Open Game License. Three point five fractured the base. Fourth edition further fractured the base. Fifth edition may have brought people back in.
If you want a solid base for tournament rules, then you need a solid set of rules. Use what you have. No new books. No settings. Just release the tournament play modules following successful tournaments. Everyone would love to play those modules! If people missed the convention then they could play the same game with their local play group. Mine the tournaments for material and use the tournaments to grease the wheels of growth.
People would have their individual campaigns, but these worlds would arise from the actions of the individual table. There would be no lore to memorize. No sudden changes to ‘continuity’ due to a new edition or novel release. It could work.
Dungeons and Dragons could go on merely as it always has. Books sell out? Who cares? Just push out a new edition. Want to make some more money? Sell a new campaign setting? Experiment and change the rules at will. Make it as friendly as possible to every home table. This game would not be the war game of AD&D, but would be an unfettered playground for the imagination.
Just recognize that D&D and AD&D are entirely separate animals. One is designed to be played as written, and it works. The other is designed to be played as adjusted and desired, and it works.