increment wrote in 1973 Pre-publication Edition of D&D:Given the number of times I have typed "of course it's possible" or something like in the past couple days, I'm a bit curious that you're suggesting I said other explanations are not possible (rather than just untenable). Do be mindful not to create a strawman of what I'm saying to argue against, either here or referring back to the beginning of this thread.

bclarkie wrote in 1973 Pre-publication Edition of D&D:

increment wrote in 1973 Pre-publication Edition of D&D:Because you're certainly not the first to raise this question, I did show the document to some experts on handwriting and art, along with samples of Gygax and Arneson's hands (and in Arneson's case, illustrations), of which I have some good exemplars.  In my paper I excerpt expert testimony from a forensics person, who does these sorts of analyses for courts, that the hand on the dungeon maps is likely to be Gygax's. If you think this would be a source of true objective certainty, though, I have some bad news for you - these experts never couch their assessments in certainties, and I only mention them in the hopes that they happen to be useful for future research.

The issue with that I would have is probably not what you would think.  I can understand the issue with handwriting expert not quantifying anything as "certain".  My issue with the maps being Gygax's would be "How did they get there?"  Now that may seem to be an obvious answer, however if your working with a photocopy of a document(as I believe that you are), that levies a whole host of other possibilities other than "He obviously put them there himself".

increment wrote in 1973 Pre-publication Edition of D&D:
My point here really was about the fact that dates don't come to you on a silver platter, and that having a date on a document isn't some kind of mystical ward that prevents confusion. I have opened a lot of old garage boxes or their close cousins in my days of researching gaming, and I'd say when you find a bunch of material together, it's a reliable indicator of rough dates, not a silver bullet. String together enough reliable indicators, from the text, from forensics, from provenance, and yes, the case for other explanations becomes untenable. Again, it's a question of how many coincidences and far-outlier hypotheses we have to tolerate at one time before the explanation that this is a photocopy of a pre-D&D draft just becomes far less painful to bear.

increment wrote in 1973 Pre-publication Edition of D&D:And how painful is it to bear? It's a bit of an aside, but I do find it interesting how easily we can swallow an early EPT draft surviving, but when it comes to D&D, we expect something much grander and more obvious. It's like a kind of "D&D exceptionalism." Because D&D turned to be so important, we develop an expectation that people must have treated it differently when it was under development, that there'd be golden tablets or something left behind. But no one knew this would be important. No one thought we'd be agonizing over these details later. We don't when the title D&D was devised, though it seems to have been quite late. We don't know how many ways of bringing the game to market were considered before TSR was founded. We really don't have much grounds to expect what form a pre-D&D draft would take. Now when it comes to Dalluhn, maybe it originally had a cover page that was lost, just like at least one page on the back of the thing was lost (it was bound only with paper clips). But even if we had a cover that said "by Dave and Gary!" I think we'd still need entirely the same textual analysis before we should believe something like this to be authentic: which is why I'm comfortable accepting the document on these grounds.