Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy

[Satinavian]

True, but that leaves me with a variety of questions, such as the ones I posted in OP.

Also, just making sure I'm not misunderstanding, but didn't the gods in AD&D have very hit points? I remember hearing Lolth had about 48, but I don't know much about older editions of D&D, but something about rolling lower being a better thing.

There is also the thing that Gygax didn't like the players to continue playing after they got to a medium level and had intended for them to retire successful characters to start anew from lv 1. So there were published stats for gods and mythical heroes with an intentional low level to give the players with vastly higher level characters a hint that they were playing the game "wrong".
This is also the reason for the insane amount of xp that higher level required. Intended to scream "Isn't it boring sitting so long at the same level ? Retire already !"

But the earlier editions had a wonky idea about what levels actually meant. Just compare the stats of dieties with the various versions of Conan that got published over time and you will see how that does simply not mesh at all.

Additionally, it has in many ways *defined* roleplaying... hit points, armor... many mechanics that we take for granted are lifted directly from D&D. It is the common infrastructure that many other games assume as a foundation, even as they make changes upon it.

Hit points are popular, but the vast majority of systems i know use armor as damage reduction. And outside of direct clones basically no one uses the alignment or the Vancian casting.

I don't think the actual D&D rules are that influential. Tabletop RPGs copy each other all the time but in many cases other solutions are more popular than how D&D does things.