Although, boy howdy, you want to talk about a prescriptive/restrictive system, I've just recently re-read bits of the first-edition AD&D Player's Handbook, and I had forgotten what a straitjacket the original Advanced system was. Dwarves can only be fighters or rogues? Really? Different ability score maximums for male and female characters. Maximum levels in some of the few classes available to some of the races. Multi-classing mechanics that were a complete load of old arse. If Third Edition was Unix, the first one, fittingly for its era, was VM/370. :)

(And, though this is not strictly relevant to how iron-fisted the game rules were, all presented in that eyestrain-inducing sans-serif font, with illustrations that in some cases look like I drew them. In hindsight, you can really tell that the first edition was made by like a half-dozen dudes, not all of whom got paid and none of whom seriously expected the product to go big, at least a decade before desktop publishing.)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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