Yeah this is kind of my point, that I think a lot of the contemporary play style is cultural and not ruleset driven. And thus I'm skeptical that merely doing something playing 1e AD&D is going to feel exactly the same as it did 40 years ago. That said, I may be overstating how typical this is in the modern game, I haven't played in 30-ish years, my take is driven by observation purely.

And also, even back then some of the more modern improv-y play style existed, it just wasn't the norm. I remember when my main play group had a session with one member's brother & friends and there was a very clear culture mismatch from the start. They were acting, with voices and all of that. We ... did not. To each their own but combining the two didn't work.

Whereas today's game is far more complicated rules-wise by most measures yet it tends to be more storytelling & *role* playing focused: flower-y, superhero-y, high fantasy

Like yourself, encumbrance was one I rarely saw used. There was usually a rough sense of "too much" but otherwise no one cared.

I played from the early 80s through early 90s. Mostly AD&D 1e but earlier on the red/blue boxes and later on 2e.

Recently I've taken to reading r/adnd for nostalgia reasons. One thing become abundantly clear real fast, no one I ever played with ever truly understood the rules. Even the "rules lawyers" among us. And I played with a large variety of people from different friend groups, to different game shops, and even some smaller cons.

We understood the key details for the parts we actually used, but we weren't intentionally avoiding the rest, we just didn't understand that they existed. There's just so much minutia in those rule books.

This also makes me chuckle when I see newer players come into r/adnd as part of the OSR movement. Because they *do* seem to assume that all of these rules were commonly applied. But my anecdata would say otherwise. I originally assumed that these newcomers to the old rules would be playing a game I found alien as they'd be bringing in newer sensibilities, but instead I suspect I'd find it alien as they're more likely to be sticklers for the full ruleset!

So how do you propose this strike happen?

What is more likely to happen is just as bad. Devastating civil infrastructure would put 10s of millions of lives at risk.

And even if one were to look at this from a myopic USA centric lens, has anyone considered how many of these people we were told needed liberation are now radicalized against us?

So?

And then there were weirdos (sickos?) such as myself who hung on for an absurd amount of time and never once used it for binaries

Polution is a big deal.

Of course, where I live the USPS person stops in a general area and does all the outgoing deliveries on foot, but it's conceivable that some days an entire block may receive no incoming mail. Also, we need to take into account things like fuel costs for planes & such throughout the entire supply chain.