In a lot of discussions about AD&D (1e, for you purists out there!), a repeated concept is the idea of "secret rules". Things players were not meant to know. Whether it's your precise chance to hit (at least before the publishing of the Player's Screen in '85), or not telling your Assassin that he can train to become a master of brewing poisons, there seems to be this clear line of demarcation between what players should know, and what DM's should know, as evidenced by Gary's comment (presumably in jest?) about any player reading the DMG is deserving of a less than noble death.
Not going to get into the philosophy of that here, but what I find myself asking is, were DM's never supposed to play the game?
Because the instant one learns how to be a DM, by reading the DMG and running adventures, they now know all this stuff. Was it just assumed that anyone who had this information would simply pretend not to, sort of a gentleman's agreement, or was it assumed that all DM's would be "forever DM's", and once you "graduated", that was that?
I highly doubt the latter would be the case, since Gary himself played the game!
I think
@Reynard mostly covered this, so I will add support.
The thing with Gygax is that if you want to find something to contradict what he said, just keep reading. Because he will contradict it, sometimes within the same paragraph.
"Skilled play" was a well-known (and predominant) mode of play at the time. So the idea that players didn't use some meta-knowledge is ... absurd.
The assumed model of play for early D&D was skilled play.
Although he was a storyteller, there was no effort to thread a plot through his dungeon. Keep in mind that this was the dawn of role-playing and some concepts of 2020 gaming weren't known then. It was entirely find the monsters, fight the monster, and take his treasure. Some of the dungeon chambers were filled with surprises. There were creatures hiding above the doors, there were creatures looking like tables and chests, and there were surprises in plain sight that would attack as we moved in the rooms. It got so that I would say upon entering any new area, “Gary, I look up, and down, and all around the area before I walk in. That stopped a lot of ugly surprises from happening.
We learned to be very cautious in Gary's dungeon. We started tossing torches and then lanterns into dark rooms. It wasn't too many burnt scrolls and broken potion bottles to have us change our ways. Soon, we were tossing in coins with Continual Light tossed on them. This caution had consequences as wandering creatures would be attracted to the magical light.
-James Ward
The reasoning behind this was, well, fairly simple. D&D was a
game. Like any game, you could play it well (or poorly!). While there was definitely roleplaying, it was rarely the full-on RPing we sometimes see today. To put it in terms of acting; some people prefer to think of RPing like Daniel Day Lewis- to fully inhabit a character. But early RPing was more like being a movie star, like Tom Cruise. Sure, he's playing a role, but he's also, always, Tom Cruise.
So now we get into the more contentious area of skilled play; the issue of metagaming. If you look above to what James Ward wrote (and what others say), you will see that there is an evolution in play. Bob I might get killed by traps below him, so Bob II looks down, but gets killed by traps above him. Bob III looks above and below, but gets hit by traps to the side. By the time Bob IV is rolling through the dungeon, he's looking up, down, and all around.
But wait- why is Bob IV doing that? Because that's how Bob I-III died! And how does Bob IV know that? Because the player knows that. Sure, you can retcon some sort of reason ("And the news of the deaths of all adventurers shall be read out in the Ye Ancient and Hallowed Halls of Bob...."), but in reality it's the acquisition of player skill- when Bob IV dies and Legolas I is created, Legolas I will also be looking out. This is similar to the age-old "troll debate." When a character see a troll regenerating, does the character know what to do to end the regeneration?
Well, back when the game was still new, it was just assumed that players would know these things, such as information about monsters, and use them. In 1977, Dragon Magazine published an article in Dragon #10 about how to generate random monsters, because "the players always know too much. ... The answer is to occasionally throw a monster at the party that keeps them on their toes, one that they have never seen before because it is unique. No rules cover it, so they have to find out the hard way what it’s like."
This doesn't mean that certain activities were not considered beyond the pale; for example, I am hard-pressed to think of anytime when (for example) a player buying a module and reading through it prior to playing it wouldn't be considered poor form, if not outright cheating. But while roleplaying was always part of the game, a key differentiating component, there wasn't the same issue with metagaming because with the skilled play paradigm, it was assumed that you were playing a game and act accordingly.
However...
I also think that Gygax is trying to speak to some of the "magic" and "mystery" of the game, which is to say- keep some things secret, so that there will always be new discoveries. It's just really inconsistent, and, to be honest, the idea of having player abilities be secret
especially when they are in a published book is bizarre, and I can't imagine that even Gygax thought it was a sustainable model.
(In fairness, there were a large number of people that just liked to play, and never read the DMG, back then. I mean... as we all know today,
no one reads the DMG.)
