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<blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7570782" data-attributes="member: 996">I thought I did, very concisely:&quot;What's necessary vs needless largely depends on the purpose of the system.&nbsp; I don't think the purposes of TSR &amp; WotC era D&amp;D, for instance, were tremendously different...&quot;&nbsp;I got the impression, back in the classic game (1e AD&amp;D, rather than 0D&amp;D, from my perspective, having started in 1980), that spells and magic items were very often added to the game because they were inspired by something in a Vance story or Harryhausen movie or Ditko comic or crib notes mythology or whatever. Science fiction as much as fantasy sources, for that matter. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink&nbsp; &nbsp; ;)"&nbsp; data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />(It seems another source of higher level spells was as challenges for players to face rather than spells for them to cast, themselves.&nbsp; Guards &amp; Wards, for instance, or Prismatic Sphere with it's cast-spells-in-specific-order puzzle solution.)Gygaxian D&amp;D didn't seem like it was designed for balance or elegance or anything like that, but more like an accretion of cool ideas collected session by session, typed up and bound between covers.&nbsp; So some savings in needless complexity seems, in retrospect, inevitable, once you got designers working on it as a system.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Tony Vargas, post: 7570782, member: 996"] I thought I did, very concisely: "What's necessary vs needless largely depends on the purpose of the system. I don't think the purposes of TSR & WotC era D&D, for instance, were tremendously different..." I got the impression, back in the classic game (1e AD&D, rather than 0D&D, from my perspective, having started in 1980), that spells and magic items were very often added to the game because they were inspired by something in a Vance story or Harryhausen movie or Ditko comic or crib notes mythology or whatever. Science fiction as much as fantasy sources, for that matter. ;) (It seems another source of higher level spells was as challenges for players to face rather than spells for them to cast, themselves. Guards & Wards, for instance, or Prismatic Sphere with it's cast-spells-in-specific-order puzzle solution.) Gygaxian D&D didn't seem like it was designed for balance or elegance or anything like that, but more like an accretion of cool ideas collected session by session, typed up and bound between covers. So some savings in needless complexity seems, in retrospect, inevitable, once you got designers working on it as a system. [/QUOTE]

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