How I Learned to Decipher High Gygaxian

I started to learn the D&D game with Moldvay Basic back in 1983. We quickly mashed the AD&D books into the mix, using whatever rules we learned from D&D to apply to AD&D gaming. No one understood that they were two completely different animals under the same name. In 1986 I purchased Temple of Elemental Evil and wanted to run a campaign from start to finish using the rules as printed. So started my quest to decipher that oft-maligned, mysterious Dungeon Master's Guide.

On the surface it seems that all the rules a DM could want or need are in that tome. Being the last of the published "core" books for AD&D (the first two being Monster Manual and Player's Handbook) it included a monster summary list, all the magic items in the game, and a few spell explanations to iron out wrinkles encountered from the Player's Handbook (although it missed a lot of problems, like the chant spell or color spray). I sat down with the book for several weeks that summer to try and make it all cohesive and easier to explain to my friends who either were too busy to read it cover to cover or did not have a copy themselves and were always going to be players anyways.

The first few sections contained rather boring details about character creation and probability curves, diseases, aging, death, and class ability descriptions from the DM's point of view. I waded through gems and jewelry listings, spell explanations, and travel procedures including getting lost in the wilderness. Then came the bread and butter chapter! The holy grail of D&D gaming, running encounters and COMBAT! I was about five pages into the section when I realized that nothing was really explained. There were a lot of terms thrown at you and a lot of modifiers for situations which we typically avoided (being consummate players), but there were no examples of combat broken down bit by bit. Even the example combats provided made little sense since they only gave some details, but not all. At one point I encountered an inconsistency that simply blew my mind - the initiative system. It made no sense at all. It was as if someone drank heavily and spewed nonsense all over the page. There was no mathematical consistency or sense to what was being said at all. Later in the section I found other glaring inconsistencies. Who had written this section? Surely it wasn't the same person who so elegantly wrote the G-series of modules, the sections in the back of the Player's Handbook filled with such witty prose and sparkling gems of information. What had happened to the editor of the book? Did they die mid-edit only to be replaced by some gremlin?? What the heck was going on? In the end we continued to chug through Temple of Elemental Evil using the primordial D&D knowledge we developed using the Basic D&D books and that worked just fine with the AD&D classes, races, spells, and magic items. If anything based on initiative ever reared its head we simply ignored the reference.

Many years later (2000) I started a new campaign in AD&D and I wanted to do it all "by the book." My players had suffered through a homebrewed, house-ruled campaign for several years prior to this so I wanted to teach them the glory of AD&D and what it could offer. Again I was at a loss to explain the combat system. Try as I might I could not rectify it. I turned to the internet for help and found Dragonsfoot.com. I read through several threads and learned that Gary Gygax did NOT write everything in the DMG!!! Apparently it was edited by the Blumes. Now it was starting to make sense. I later learned that E.G.G. didn't even USE the rules printed in the book. What the heck? I learned that all my mathematical twisting and repurposing of terms was just useless. In the end I adopted the system that many of the others were using with some minor hold-outs that DID make sense to me.

In the end I learned that the parts of the DMG I did love were penned by Gygax himself, but the tidbits that did not make any sense may have been additions to the system from other sources. I now am happy with what we use, but it seems that the DMG is hopelessly broken - at least the combat section. If you happen to read anything else by Gygax you will see what I mean. The Role-Playing Mastery book he wrote was spot on and his theory craft on gaming was second to none. So what if AD&D seems clunky and difficult to read. To me you gain more from re-reading a few pages every once in a while than reading once and plowing forward. Each and every time I pick up that book I find a new tidbit that I never knew about before or had forgotten. And as I have proven in the past, you can use Moldvay D&D combat rules with AD&D and it still works just fine.