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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerricB" data-source="post: 5371286" data-attributes="member: 3586">However, between AD&D and LA, Gary designed Dangerous Journeys (Mythus), which wandered into the insanely complex.It should be noted that early D&D (in particular) was influenced by a range of designers. Gary was editing everything together and rebalancing it using his judgement, but he also had his friends insisting that various rules were making the game better.I've always suspected that Len Lakofka was one of the chief culprits here: certainly his columns in Dragon Magazine were often giving rules that were far more complicated than the rest of the system.It's worth noting that D&D has always had this uneasy balance between being a game (hit points) and being more of a simulation (weapon types vs armour). The initiative rules are a case in point: certainly the original three booklets of OD&D didn't have initiative spelt out, but if you looked in Chainmail you'd find a system that was quite similar to what was later presented in AD&D: a complicated set of rules depending on weapon length when charging, weapon speed otherwise, and so forth. The AD&D rules give you the impression that there *wasn't* a set system and that Gary was making it up as he went along. I was quite surprised to find out that he used a d10 for initiative...Cheers!</blockquote>