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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5226378" data-attributes="member: 58197">I doubt it was a deliberate choice to promote creativity; after all, we're talking about the early days of D&D here, when people were still figuring out the basics of how to make an RPG go. My guess is, Gygax and Arneson simply didn't give it much thought. They were too busy hammering on the core rules to worry about the peripheral cases.Maybe for people who hang out on ENWorld and see all the discussions of AD&D and OD&D and the merits of various editions. That does not describe most of my players, though.But some versions are... I was going to say "more inadequate," but that implies a denigration of the smaller rulesets, so let's go with "more non-comprehensive" than others. The 3.5 rules were clearly intended to provide support within the rules for every likely scenario, hence the elaborate skill system and combat maneuvers and so forth. They didn't cover every possibility, but they covered enough that when a weird situation came up, "look it up" was a reasonable default response; there was a good chance there would be rules for it somewhere.In the early editions, BECMI especially, looking it up was a waste of time. You knew it wasn't gonna be there, so the DM just made a ruling on the fly and you went with that.</blockquote>