Researching OD&D at the OD&D discussion boards

[After posting this stuff in the morning I added a few more links in the evening that I missed during the first run due to some browser tabs I had overlooked]

In the past couple of weeks I had a lot of fun reading through the various postings at the OD&D discussion boards (and I'm still going strong). I find the comments there very helpful in getting into the right mindset for reading the little brown books and to get sensitive about the finer formulations used in the rules.

Reading OD&D from cover to cover: The character classes

I have been anticipating the coming parts of Men & Magic a lot as now we finally get to the rules. Here I expect quite a number of surprises and my intention s to (at initially) read the rules as literally as possible and revise them in a clearer (yet brief) way. In no way do I intend to add much fluff, so I was particularly curious about the very short character class section in OD&D: One and a half pages in total for the classes (with clerics getting the most text which I find interesting), three total if taking the races into account (which I will review in another post).