>>94598946it was really a child of its age and culture still growing out of being a pure tactical war game (where all the number crunching and miniatures had root in) and trying to marry it with stuff pulled from fantasy narratives, except it was more inspired by settings like Conan than Tolkien
as such magic was so inherently dangerous and costly that playing anything aside from some flavor of fighter really sucked to track and to roleplay to a degree (a single casting of Haste made your target... age a fucking year)
also, Gygax insisted on rolling for stats, even if it made nonfunctional monstrosities and having like 7 backup characters due to general game lethality
almost all of that shit got handwaved away if you had a reasonable DM, but since it was early into the idea of TTRPGs, a lot of them wouldn't dare to be that experimental, which gave a ton of groups an extremely rough experience, the fact DnD became what it is after that is a testament of persistence of human willingness to be cringe in front of their friends
