Quote:
Originally Posted by smascrns
That's the issue Lev raises in his reviews of ADD. If I read him correctly, his contention is that dungeon bashing is a subset of roleplaying. But there are a lot more ways of roleplaying. From his perspective, the quality of a rpg book is related to how encompassing it is, how much the book provides for players with different styles and approaches. If a book only catters to a very limited set and does not provide stuff for roleplayers that want in a different style, the book is low of content.
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But at the time TSR published the Monster Manual, dungeon bashing was not a subset of roleplaying - it was the default style for the great majority of players. It's the other styles that were subsets, and small ones at that. This is why we're seeing such strong criticism of Lev's reviews; not because he dares to give AD&D a bad review, but because he refuses to recognize that the style of play he prefers was not supported by TSR's D&D material
on purpose, not because of incompetence. He judges AD&D a failure because it wasn't the sort of game he wanted it to be. As others have noted, that's poor criticism.