Have you ever read the original Dungeons And Dragons? The one from 1974? In the modern times it's pretty common to find someone who has sat around a table and pretended to be a fictional character, using a set of defined rules to decide what actions are and aren't allowed. However, when Dungeons And Dragons was invented, the whole concept was very foreign and the book does not do a very good job of helping new players figure out how to play. While the vagueness of the book is quite bad for an inexperienced player, for someone who was deep in the culture at the time, the blanks provided the freedom to interpret it the way you prefer to play. With the release of Fantastic Medieval Campaigns by Marcia B making the original game basically free, I thought I would talk about my favorite ambiguities in the rules and just make some stuff up I think would be cool if the game has chose my weird interpretation of it. A quick disclaimer, pretty much every ruling I'm going to give has been confirmed wrong, either by future editions clarifying, or the writers themselves answering questions in magazines. This is just a for fun "what if you were reading this book with nobody to help you" scenario.
One of the first weird parts of the book is how experience is handled. Long story short, having high or low stats has no affect on your performance in-game. Instead, having high stats gives you a bonus to your experience points during a campaign. So, if you got 100 experience points during a game and you have a 10% bonus, you actually get 110 points. The first ambiguity comes from prime requisites. You see, which stat is used to increase your experience is determined by your class, so for example you want high Strength on a Fighter. It notes in these stats that you can use prime requisites from other classes, using either a 2-for-1 or 3-for-1 ratio. Now the correct reading is that you can lower those stats to increase your main one, but what if it wasn't? I think a more interesting rule is that having other stats that are high allows you to treat your prime requisite as higher than it actually is for experience purposes. This would encourage keeping your stats and not dumping all of it into your prime stat, which would keep the door open for your character having multiple classes later.
Another interesting one is in Magic Armor. is says that the bonus of the armor is "subtracted from the hit dice of the opponent". This is just kinda nonsense cause hit dice is what you roll to determine hit points, and I don't think they are implying that magic armor drains the life force of your enemies just by being in the same room as them. So the canon interpretation is that you reduce the attack roll of your opponent by the bonus amount, so if you have a bonus of 2, a roll of 12 becomes 10. What I think would be more interesting however, is if the bonus subtracted from the damage instead. Given that there is no way of exceeding an Armor value of 2, which is equal to the modern game's 17, and the fact that no monsters in the base list of armors exceed that value either, it could be argued that the original intention for the game was that once the characters achieved a high enough level that the roll to hit your opponent would be eventually phased out entirely. Your high level characters would hit enemies as easily as they walk or eat, and instead dungeon exploration becomes more about resource management and tactics. A lot of the game is already centered around resources to start with, you have to bring torches to see and food to eat with you on journeys. You have to manage your limited number of spells per day, along with your arrows and any other limited attacking item. There is also the matter of paying for a place to stay in-between adventures, stables for horses you might have, paying to store your treasures in a bank or secure vault, paying for specialist work like deciphering magic runes or translating ancient texts, and so much more. Removing one of the core sources of luck in fighting and just making it about managing your HP is probably the logical endpoint of the game, with the attack roll existing during the early part of the game as a way to spice up the game since you haven't unlocked all of your abilities yet.
The final piece of the game I want to talk about is the use of the Chainmail war game (renamed Chain of Command in Fantastic Medieval Adventures). Now it is pretty clear what they want us to do in terms of using it with the RPG, use the combat rules, but replace every instance of kill with rolling for damage. Simple enough, until you realize there are three different rules systems in the book (four if you count jousting). So which one are we supposed to be using? Well, the book tells us that our characters are equivalent to a certain number of figures, such as a level 3 fighter being equivalent to 3 figures. It also eventually gives us two possible options, either reading them as a number of standard figures, or as a number of fantastic figures such as Heroes. From this, they probably wanted you to use the mass combat table, combined with the fantasy figure table. Personally though, I feel like this would make the game too simple, and would instead use the One-On-One combat system. This would effectively work like the Alternative Combat System that is included (which would become the standard system in modern versions of the game), except instead of rolling a 20 sided die, you would roll 2 six sided dice. If you wish to incorporate the figures statistic, you could rule it that the number of figures a character is worth represents how many attacks they can make per turn. The One-On-One system adds two additional points of interest to the combat that would be worth exploring. The first one is that weapons have different levels of effectiveness against different types of armor, making having multiple types of weapons a useful thing to have. The second thing that it adds is weapon speed. Weapon speed determines the order in which characters attack. For example, if one character has a dagger and the other has a flail, then the dagger always goes first. However, the character with a slower weapon gets the option to parry, and slower weapons give bigger bonuses to the parry mechanic. I'm clearly not the only one who found these mechanics interesting, as Fantastic Medieval Adventures includes a page that converts the One-On-One tables to be used with the modern combat rules.
What would it be like to play with these rulings? I don't know, I can't convince anybody to play this with me, but maybe you can and I can read about it in a blog. I think having the ability to interpret the rules to your preferences is a valuable thing. Like how everybody has their own slightly different version of how UNO works, I think allowing yourself to play the version of a fantasy world that works the way you think makes sense is valuable.