The original game slowly evolved instead of being designed all together, which is why sometimes there are contridictions in the rules.elf23 wrote:I wonder if all those things you mention really just evolved, if they were kind of "play-tested" and tweaked as a result, or if Gary just made them up one day and that was that. I sort of suspect the latter, though I've never heard reports either way. Perhaps some 70s old-timers (don't know if there are any around here) might have an idea?
Exact details are often argued, but essentially Dave Arneson had this dungeon crawl game based on miniatures combat and Gary Gygax heard about it and loved the concept. Dave sent his rules to Gary and Gary took some of his rules from his own Chainmail miniatures rules set (which had a "Fantasy Supplement" part already) and blended the ideas together somewhat to create a rules set. This notebook of rules underwent playtest through friends of Gary's and guys like Rob Kuntz, Jim Ward, Richard Snyder and Brian Blume contributed many of their own ideas. This wasn't one big design session but instead many different groups with ideas. Clerics, for example, came about in Dave's campaign to counter the fact that one of Dave's players had decided to run a vampire character. Choices and innovations of early players became the standard options for the next wave of players.
The original OD&D rules set wasn't really designed mathematically, but more intuitively. If the fighter had a certain XP progression how much faster or slower should the magic user advance? These things were more gut-call than calculation. Characters were designed to top out at somewhat low levels early on (4th was a "hero" and 8th a "super hero") but as time passed characters reached those heights and rules were put in place to advance above those originally intended.
So, as to Gary making it up "one day" he may have envisioned a few of the details in a short time span, but most of the current game system was developed slowly over time. Paladins were tougher than fighters so they should have a slightly higher XP chart than the fighter.
Even once OD&D got published in 1974 the rules weren't done. Four supplements came out in the next year or so adding things like thieves, druids, psionics, and the like. TSR's newsletter The Strategic Review (later re-named The Dragon magazine) had ideas for the Ranger and so on. Magic user spells were added onto the original charts, and the top spell level cast jumped from 6th level to 9th level spells. Hit dice were tweaked from all d6's to different dice types by class. The game slowly grew and evolved into what would really be re-written and re-organized as AD&D. None of this was part of some "master plan" early on, and as such there are still places in the original rules where folks can argue rules interpretations and so on.
Labyrinth Lord benefits from the fact that most of the growing pains had finished when the LL rules were written. Dan was able to take all of the versions of rules and select the parts that work well together and discard anything that didn't. That's one huge advantage of LL over many of the early products, that since "we gamers" learned how to make the game better we could have a finished product that didn't include all of the oddities along the way.
