>>96194511
>There's your problem,
No, that's your problem.
You want to pretend the OSR is way more strict than it actually is, like the entire movement is centered around replicating a singular (and hallucinated) style, and largely just so you can try to bully people against playing in any style except your imagined one. You try to pretend that your style is the one and true OSR way, and then try to appeal to authority by saying it's the way that Gygax played, when the reality is that the OSR is a loose collection of different games with very different styles and interpretations of what elements of the "Old School" are worth preserving/imitating, and Gygax had a habit of contradicting himself so that it's essentially impossible to replicate a singular style in imitation of him.
We're talking about the guy who said "A DM only rolls dice for the noise they make" all the way back in 1983 and even then managed to shake grognards like yourself down to their cores. We're talking about games played decades ago, with very loose documentation, with hundreds of different and contradictory accounts, and people like yourself trying to argue that your personal interpretation is the one that everyone else needs to follow only serving to further obfuscate what little information we do have.
It's much easier just to throw those kind of fallacies out and accept that people want to play in different ways and that the OSR is really just about people who like games inspired by the Old School style, not with a sense of strict fidelity, but out of recognition that some parts of older editions were personally preferable to the direction some parts of the newer edition was going.
It's about preserving tools so we don't forget their function and can use them appropriately, not so we can live like the Amish.