NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 5028775" data-attributes="member: 80487">The degree of success in different endeavors in the AD&D books varies. I don't think Gygax tried very hard really to produce the clear-cut tournament rules set he bruited, and in any case the weight of evidence suggests to me that technical writing simply was not his strong suit. The DMG especially seems clearly to have wanted more copy editing, and changes due to the evolving design were never harmonized in the earlier volumes.Psionics factors in the MM are a mixed up mess (See Supp. III). The x.p. values in Appendix E look to have been "eyeballed" rather than calculated. It was probably not until a few years after publication that Gygax actually used the rules for grappling, pummeling and overbearing enough (at all?) to find them tiresome.I think the HD boosts were an overdue response to the boosts in monster damage from Supplement I. Basic D&D is "hard ball" in that regard! The MU was left out of that (but already had a significant improvement over the original set, except at 1st level). So was the ranger and so, IIRC, was the monk.Those changes, and others, were clearly based on balance concerns.What levels should one expect PCs eventually to attain? I think that crept up with Supplement I, again with AD&D, and yet again with Unearthed Arcana. By 1985, I think Gygax may also have had in mind the way in which AD&D was actually getting played -- as opposed to how he had played it. That change in fundamental expectations as to what a "campaign" meant in terms of space, time, number of players, number of characters, and so on, marked the emergence of "a different game" much more truly IMO than had the publication of AD&D.There are things in UA that seem to me out of whack anyway, but pretty clearly the goal posts were moving.A case in point, at least to my mind, was a letter to The Dragon complaining that some things had been okay for the magazine -- but became "official", and thus mandatory, when put into the book. Not only that, but UA was apparently the last straw in an overweening imposition of "Gary's campaign" upon all AD&Ders.That's a bit odd to me, but I see the seeds of the view on which the Wizards' edifice seems to have been built. Nor do I think it totally at odds with Gygax's own pontification of the time.</blockquote>

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