Interesting video, very illuminating. Some surprising positions are taken here, which I will paraphrase:

• You can’t play AD&D RAW.

• Characters retire at 9th level due to the lethality of play at that tier.

• Delegation of high level NPC’s to players is declared to be destructive to the campaign.

• Strict timekeeping… but not 1:1 time. (Players can skip a year into the future to go play in JapanWorld or whatever.)

• NPC’s are not active in the campaign world in the same way that the PC’s are… though they are active. They have goals with arbitrary “clocks” set on each stage of their activities. Players see the result of this progress as they travel the world and pick up rumors.

• A formal concept of “drift” is introduced— i.e., that the rules of the 45 year campaign necessarily change over time and that the rules of the various long running AD&D campaigns will naturally diverge over time.

  The AD&D referee is thus expected to make elaborate house rule additions, use articles from Dragon Magazine including “NPC Classes” and so forth.

Each of these axioms or assertions work together to suppress the emergence of the sort of gameplay dynamics that the BrOSR have championed over the past several years. And based on Rick’s account of his campaign, it sounds as if this framework results in something relatively close to what we call “conventional play” that is sustainable for A VERY LONG PERIOD OF TIME.

Naturally, people would like to know who is right. Rick… or the BrOSR? Phrased another way, the question is “which side in this dispute is playing the game described by the AD&D core rulebooks?”

An in depth breakdown of precisely where and how each side fails to live up to the greatness of those extremely influential rules volumes would of course be very VERY tedious. In any case it would be pointless to go through with such an effort. Because Rick has already announced that he is not even trying to play RAW.

I am not sure that I have heard him say anything like this before. It seems like an extraordinarily strange position to take, though. What could possibly motivate it?

The most reasonable explanation that I can think of is that attempting to play AD&D RAW is going to lead you to play more like the BrOSR than not. And Rick hasn’t been doing that and doesn’t want to do that, so he has now conceded “RAW” to us.

I am glad that he did.