5. David Cook credits you with the organization of AD&D Second Edition. What principles did you bring to bear when undertaking the task of making such a complex game easier to understand?
Rulebook organization was a regular subject for theological debate among the editors, and I preached the Gospel of Steve to anyone who would listen. Here's the quick version.
A set of game rules needs to decide up front whether its job is teaching the material to newcomers or serving as a reference manual for people who already know the fundamentals. I don't believe it can do both. All through the '80s, we'd been producing D&D products aimed at teaching the basics to newcomers. That's not what AD&D was about. We assumed that AD&D players already understood roleplaying and had at least a rudimentary grasp on the rules. They didn't need a training manual; they needed a reference book that made information easy to find during play. Reading the original hardcover books was like having a one-on-one conversation with Gary. They were charming but not much help when a question arose in the middle of a battle.
When we got the green light to start working on 2nd Edition, the first thing I did was grab spare copies of the PHB and DMG, slice them into pieces, and start taping them back together the way they belonged. (We were working on word processors by then, of course, but the PHB and DMG didn't exist in electronic form.) It didn't take long to fill a big, fat, 3-ring binder with clippings of rulebooks, all taped together like some insane kidnapper's ransom-note manifesto. Some material from both books was combined into one section, some material that had been joined was split between the books, some sections were torn apart sentence by sentence and reassembled in more logical order. It was terribly tedious work, but it was also something I'd wanted to do for a decade.
The point of this exercise wasn't really to reorganize the books; that was done (eventually) with a massive outline that stretched down the wall and across the floor on about a dozen sheets of accordion-fold paper. The giant cut-and-paste was done to demonstrate to those up the chain of authority that the job was too big to be handled by a simple reorganization, which is what some of them were hoping for at the time.
Through the whole 2nd Edition development process, the goal was to put everything the players needed into the PHB and everything else into the DMG. Players needed the rules on creating and equipping characters, on magic, and on combat. The DM needed the rules on world building, running adventures, and all the little things that crop up often enough to need rules but not often enough to deserve space in the PHB.
Finally, I wanted both books to have comprehensive indexes. They were created the old-fashioned way, by actually reading the final galleys of the books and noting down every instance of a rule or a subject that should be indexed, under every category where someone might search for it. That job took several days, but the resulting indexes were well worth it.
