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James: Gary Gygax
thanks you in both the AD&D Players Handbook
and Dungeon Masters Guide.
What role did you play
in the development of these two books or indeed the entire AD&D project?
Tim Kask: Continuing in the same vein as the answer to the previous question, we constantly bounced ideas off of each other. There came a time when we started to list all of the revisions and contradictions.
We had other problems to
address: level and gold piece inflation being two of them, as well as a
too-steep learning curve. In the early days, we sold our game to college
age buyers, bright high schoolers and the occasional socially challenged
older gamer. As bright as they were in general, many of them had complained
of the steep learning curve and seeming contradictions in subsequent supplements.
No matter how much I tried to drum home the idea that these were suggestions,
examples and guidelines in the Forewords that I wrote in each, people wanted
to see them as new rules. And, we were starting to hear from parents that
had bought the game as a result of their child’s cajolery, badgering or
whining, only to find that it was too complex for their precious darlings
to jump right in. On that point, I can certainly testify; had I not confidently
announced that my club was going to have a go at this new game I was so
enraptured with, I might not have spent three weeks trying to grasp enough
of it to begin. And I had the benefit of having played it twice. All of
these things Gary and I talked about, and more. It was decided to consult
with someone with some background in child psych, and J. Eric Holmes came
into the picture.
James: Returning to your role in the development of AD&D ...
Tim Kask: Continuing in the same vein as the answer to the previous question, we constantly bounced ideas off of each other. There came a time when we started to list all of the revisions and : One Thursday, Gary told me to wrap up whatever I had going on at the moment and free up my days starting on the next Monday. Intrigued, I said sure. When I came in on Monday morning, Gary asked me into his office (we were still in the old grey house and had offices next to each other), then told whoever was answering the phone that neither of us was to be disturbed for anything but the direst emergency, or a call from our wives. He had about six sets of the small books and had put up several extra cork bulletin boards in office. For the next eight or nine days, we re-made D&D.
We tinkered with various bits and pieces, changing and tweaking damages from various weapons and spells (Magic Missile comes to mind). At the end of that period of time, we had two files of papers and cut-up booklets; one was Basic, the other AD&D. Much less was left to interpretation; more was spelled out in charts and tables. We were looking at tourneys. We must have rolled several hundred different confrontations while we tinkered with HP and DAM. We cut up those books and stuck stuff all over the walls. From that came Basic D&D and Advanced D&D. I was like the midwife at the birth.