Any love for 2E around here?

[tkdco2]

I love AD&D. The original edition still holds a special place in my heart, but it's 2nd Edition that hits the sweet spot for me. I gave 3E a fair try, but I didn't like it much and happily returned to 2E. Same thing with 5E.

I don't use all the books. I bought many of the class/race handbooks and created characters with different kits, but nowadays I just stick with the core rulebooks. I never bought the Player's Option books, and I never wanted to. I think they unnecessarily complicated the game.

Does anyone else like this version of the game?

[Finarvyn]

I started with OD&D, partly moved onto AD&D when it came out, and eventually partly bought into 2E when it came out. (I say "partly" because I mostly ran OD&D even while my friends would DM AD&D and eventually 2E.) I enjoyed the experience. At one point I had a huge stack of the burgundy race/class books and all sorts of stuff for 2E, but I eventually downsized most of that stuff and nowadays have just the core rulebooks and haven't played 2E in around 15 years now. Very positive memories, but now just focused on OD&D and 5E.

I think that the problem I had was that there were too many rules, and the newer class options all seemed better than the originals so nobody wanted to play 2E by the original books anymore. Plus, the other main DM in my group (the one most into running 2E) got divorced and moved away from the rest of us so there was no one really pushing for 2E anymore.

[verhaden]

I still have all of my 2e books -- I would mostly use things like the MM as a backup reference. Nothing in the rules themselves that particularly excite me.

I do enjoy 2e settings like Planescape, Dark Sun, and things like BG2.

[Vile Traveller]

AD&D in its entirety passed me by completely, as did 3.5E and 4E. I kind of went B/X -> 3E -> Holmes -> Holmes+5E.

[captainjapan]

I remember when the first kid on our block got the 2E Player's Handbook and thAC0 entered the game. That was a pretty big shake-up to those of us still relegated to our older brothers' hand-me-down 1st ed. books from the 70's.

It didn't really kick in for us until we started working for a living and could afford to blow a full paycheck on TSR's by then substantial offerings. One of the DM's fell hard for the Dark Sun paperbacks. Dark Sun was about as different a campaign as I had ever played. I was playing a giant praying mantis, spending bone chips, and dying from thirst on even the shortest expeditions. Needless to say, it was a blast. But, I don't know if I'd be up for a by-the-book ad&d game of any sort, now. I like to make up my own stuff.

[doublejig2]

2E and the art of Gerald Brom - Dark Sun. A terrifying campaign setting.

[owlorbs]

I played 2e for several years and loved it. Mainly Lankhmar but a little Forgotten Realms too. If you leave out all the optional rules (in the core books) you're left with a pretty simple game. These days I like it much simpler than that, hence OD&D.

[Zenopus]

Two of the guys in my local group run 2E, mostly the core books plus houserules. From late 2010 until 2017 our primary game was a 2E Temple of Elemental Evil campaign (though I played a half-orc cleric/fighter made under 1E rules). Since then we've alternated two main campaigns, one of which is a 2E Menzoberranzen game. I just own a copy of the 2E PHB and that's enough.

[tkdco2]

I made the mistake of selling my 1e books when I bought 2e. Then again, I needed the cash. I eventually got new 1e copies. But I still have my original 2e books around, and I'll probably use them if I run a campaign. People complained about not going with the newest edition, but I'm not abut to spend money and time learning new rules on a game I may run 2-3 times a year. I made that mistake with 3e, which I didn't care for.

I still run 1e from time to time when I'm nostalgic. But most of the time, it's either 2e or B/X.

[mrmanowar]

Lots of love for 2E here. I started with a blend of 1E and basic D&D in 1988, but by the time I could afford to buy a book on my 11 year old allowance and such, 2E had just come out and the limited books around meant I bought the 2E PHB when it came out. On a more recent note, since I like actual analog (meaning paper copies) of books instead of digital, I bought my daughters their own copies of the PHB, from 2E. The same release I bought way back in 1989 (Original cover). First edition and even OD&D stuff in original format have gone up in price for nice shape books so I opted for 2E as an option close to what I started with. Also then we can use the Wizard Spell Compendiums, the Priest Spell Compendiums and Encyclopedia Magica books I have. I DO NOT allow the splat books and their kits and all as that complicates things for me when we cross reference things with 1E and OD&D. I would like to get some additional "play copies" of 1E and OD&D but they are out of the question price wise. My kids love reading through their 2E books and as an additional plus, Jeff Easley drew them a picture of a dragon on the inside covers along with signing them and also, Zeb Cook, Jon Pickens and Steve Winter signed them and gave my kids little inspirational messages, like "Kill them all!" and other such DM advice. I suppose I should beware when they run me on further campaigns...

Yes, Dad can be terminally uncool at times, but not yet!

[tkdco2]

Here's a video on why people should play 2E (Warning: some profanty in the video).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOM6TmhsOSo

[Finarvyn]

Oct 20, 2019 7:22:50 GMT -6 verhaden said:

...the MM as a backup reference.

Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. The 2E Monster Manual is one of my favorites. Easy to use with OD&D, plus has neat colored pictures.

[Falconer]

I started with 2e and like it, but over the years I came to prefer the organization and flavor of the 1e books. I’m always looking for ways to slim down my collection, and I’m afraid not much 2e product has made the cut. I know I have The Complete Book of Humanoids and Arms and Equipment Guide, but I can’t remember the last time I pulled them out.

[hamurai]

I started with AD&D 2e and still have many books, mostly in German, including some 1e ones. I'm very glad I still have a very good and complete copy of the German Dark Sun box set and some other DS books. That's one of my favourite settings ever and I often use elements for other games I run.

I like some aspects of 2e and use these in my other-edition games (OD&D and 5E), like the difference between clerics and priests, for example. Most of what I use in my games is a wild mix of many editions and settings, though, so I'm not exactly sure what other things (apart from the fluff) I still use from 2e.

Also, I really like the artwork of AD&D and I often use it to create atmosphere and to establish a mood for the game.

[artikid]

Yes
Huge Birthright fan here.
I think that rules-wise 2e works best as a reorganization of 1e.
With the exclusion of settings, I stuck to the following set-up and never had issues:
The three core rulebooks
The Tome of Magic
The Complete books of Humanoids

If I had to make a criticism, it would be about three things:
1.NWPs could have been simpler and integrated with Thief skills/climbing/ hearing noises
2.I would have used BX stat modifiers
3. Level caps for demi humans were too high for my tastes, I would have lowered the caps and allowed to rise in levels after the cap at a 50% XP penalty

[asaki]

I didn't get to play D&D until early high-school, which was right before 3E came out, so 2nd Edition was my first foray into the game. Lots of nostalgia there, and a lot of my friends had/have the books, so it's pretty easy to run campaigns. I always loved the artwork in the original printing (I'm not much of a fan of the later "2.5 Edition" print), much nicer stuff than 1E had (though it did have a few really good pieces).

I've been running my friends through a 2E Ravenloft campaign, and I've been getting used to it. Sometimes I like how there are rules included for all kinds of little instances...sometimes I feel like the rules are a little over-complicated...but in practice, I usually end up overlooking whatever bits I don't care for. I like that they got rid of some of the parts of A/D&D that I didn't like (like assassins and psyonics), but I think they should've kept more from Unearthed Arcana.

[tkdco2]

I agree with the B/X stat modifiers, as B/X is my other favorite edition of D&D. I was okay with the increased level limits for demihumans, as I'm partial to playing elven fighter/mages.

The nice thing about 2E is that you can add stuff from 1E without much trouble. Nowadays I'd add the monk class presented in Dragon magazine, although monks and bards weren't popular in the groups I gamed with. I can add half-orcs if anyone wanted to play one.

[Desparil]

I started with 2E and have a lot of great memories with it. I haven't actually played it in a long time, though. I have to say I have the exact opposite opinion of Falconer, though - I thought the organization of the 1E books was godawful and that the organization, editing, and index in 2E were a huge improvement. And while some interesting tidbits were lost from the 1E appendices that were eliminated, the 2E appendices were amazingly useful in a utilitarian way.

[Punkrabbitt]

I was a reluctant 2E player until Dark Sun came along. I ran a 2-year campaign that people *still* come back and talk to me about. That was my absolute rpg apex.

[asaki]

While we're on the subject, I made a high-res scan of what might possibly be my first ever AD&D character sheet, and cleaned it all up so I could print out clean blanks:

www.enworld.org/threads/a-d-2nd-edition-character-sheet.481198/post-7844862

[Falconer]

Oct 30, 2019 0:10:12 GMT -6 Desparil said:

I have to say I have the exact opposite opinion of Falconer, though - I thought the organization of the 1E books was godawful and that the organization, editing, and index in 2E were a huge improvement.

It’s not really an opinion so much as just my experience. We were playing 2E, and it became important to know how long exactly we had to sleep to recover spells. We searched the 2E books high and low, and just couldn’t find it. I happened to have recently acquired the 1E books, and it was a snap, right there on page 40, clear as day at a glance:



Maybe I found it in the Index:



Or maybe I found it in the Table of Contents:



I just tried to go again into the 2E books and find the info, this time with the benefit of a keyword search in a PDF, and still no dice. This obviously anecdotal, but, it’s how it happened to me. Different peoples’ brains work differently, and all that.

The other thing that really struck me was the fact that if you cast find familiar in 1E, there is a chance you could get a “special” familiar—a quasit, brownie, imp, or pseudo-dragon. I thought that was so cool. I didn’t understand why that had been removed in 2E, and you could only get an animal. I thought maybe the 2E core was genericized in order to layer on the flavor through campaign settings, but still, you know, I was getting into Greyhawk at the time, and it seemed like the best way to get that Greyhawk flavor was with 1E.

[artikid]

Well my previous comments on what I would've changed are very much an expression of personal tastes.
However, I think we can agree that 2e's DMG is the worst ever over 5 editions (well 5.5) of the game?
Lots of material copied from the PHB, lots of ranting, very little guidance on actual adventure (and most notably dungeon) design.

[Desparil]

Nov 4, 2019 13:13:22 GMT -6 Falconer said:

I just tried to go again into the 2E books and find the info, this time with the benefit of a keyword search in a PDF, and still no dice. This obviously anecdotal, but, it’s how it happened to me. Different peoples’ brains work differently, and all that.

The other thing that really struck me was the fact that if you cast find familiar in 1E, there is a chance you could get a “special” familiar—a quasit, brownie, imp, or pseudo-dragon. I thought that was so cool. I didn’t understand why that had been removed in 2E, and you could only get an animal. I thought maybe the 2E core was genericized in order to layer on the flavor through campaign settings, but still, you know, I was getting into Greyhawk at the time, and it seemed like the best way to get that Greyhawk flavor was with 1E.

I just found it in 2E without even needing recourse to anything other than chapter titles - I flipped to Chapter 7: Magic and it was on the first full page following the introductory paragraph. Plus, since they simplified the rule so that you need a full night's sleep no matter what and the only variable factor is the number of spell levels being memorized, I don't think I've ever actually needed to look it up in practice.



As for the familiars, 2E leaned further on DM discretion rather than random tables. The monster entries for all of those creatures mention them as familiars IIRC, but leave it up to the DM to determine if and when they're appropriate rather than having them be some kind of lotto scratch ticket prize for players who roll a 96-00 or whatever. And yeah, it's true that the core books removed pretty much all setting information, I never really noticed much since I was making up my own world as I went along but I can see that being a bit of a bummer if you were a GH fan.

[tkdco2]

I think the 2e DMG gets a bad rap sometimes. It has some interesting ideas and good information. Running a game in different time periods and making your own class are examples. A lot that was in the 1e version was taken out, but some of the things removed (such as the spell descriptions) were already in the PHB and didn't have to be repeated. Other things like psionics weren't included in 2e until later. I suspect the town encounter table was removed because of the harlot subtable, which was probably removed for the same reason demons and devils were removed from 2e at first.

[azera]

After getting turned off of 3E, 2E AD&D (using just the 3 core books) was my main D&D for almost two decades. I'm not going to pretend it's perfect (the spell list is incredibly bloated, thief skills are still a weird appendix that isn't sure if they're magical or mundane and how they're supposed to interact with NWPs, the alignment sections in the PHB and the DMG are both messes, and unarmed combat is still needlessly overcomplicated for a game that's built for abstract combat, just to name a few issues off the top of my head), but it's very good.

The MM is my favorite MM from any edition, with how it has combat information AND lore AND adventure hooks AND (mostly) nice art for every entry. Sure, some of them are incomplete (devils/demons), some of them are bad (dolphin/wolf), some of them are bloated (dragons), but it's still my first point of reference when I think "how can I use this monster in a game?"

The DMG depends on what you want from it.  It was a step back from what OD&D, B/X, 1E, or 5E (the other D&D Referee/DM books I'm familiar with) had in terms of tools for use in real play, but I think only B/X was better in terms of giving advice on how to set-up and run games.  I liked it for actually explaining some of the thoughts behind why the rules were what they were and giving some options on how to change them.  I liked that it talked about thinking on why an encounter is there or thinking about making dungeons have a sense of logic, which I think are more useful than a dozen tables of room shapes/sizes and monster lists.  I could not care less about losing the urban encounters table (which had plenty of problems beyond just the harlot subtable) or the disease and insanity sections.  On the other hand, I dislike that it cut out a lot of the mechanical support for things like wilderness adventures and castle construction, and I think it should've gone further in cutting out the passive-aggressive rubbish advice on handling out-of-game problems with in-game punishments.  Overall, I liked it, but I think B/X did it better.

The various setting books, "complete book of <thing>" series, etc. were mostly nice, but none of them really hooked me hard enough to feel like I wanted to include them on a regular basis (Ravenloft was probably my favorite in concept, but the actual mechanics and adventures written for it weren't to my tastes).  Player's Option series felt weird and unnecessary until I realized it was a testing ground for 3E ideas (after that, it just felt unnecessary )

There were a lot of bad 2E adventures, but there were some great ones as well!  The mind flayers trilogy and sahuagin trilogy were both full of cool stuff (beholder trilogy, not so much), and I could gush on for a long time about Night Below.  Return to the Keep on the Borderlands was a neat idea, though way too wordy.  I never got Return to the Tomb of Horrors or Die Vecna Die, but they seem to have good reputations (then again, so does Vecna Lives, which I thought was awful )

[Vile Traveller]

I skipped 2E, 3.5E, and 4E, so I don't know nuffink. 😋

[jeffb]

Not a real love, but a healthy amount of really like. As a cleaned up ruleset, I prefer it over 1E. I think Zeb did a great job or organizing and codifying some areas that needed it.

I like many of the Settings- Ravenloft, Dark Sun, From the Ashes era GH, and despite alot of stinkers, there were some real gem products for Forgotten Realms.

I like many of the sourcebooks, the Historical reference series, the DMG series, the Von Richten's guides to the various undead.

Though not strong with The Force, er Adventures, some of the 2E settings had some great adventures- I run Night of the Living Dead every other year at Halloween.

In retrospect, I think I prefer the 2E product model best- Not that all of it was great in execution, but:

TSR gave us lots of setting materials to use or not.

They gave us lots of player tools to use or not.

They gave us lots of DM tools to use or not.

In particular, they did not try to shoehorn the AD&D core ruleset into a setting and make the setting conform to the rules*, unlike WOTC versions of the game which makes everything "legal" despite how ridiculous it may be (like Tiefling PCs running around GH). The setting should come first,and rules should be changed to reflect the uniqueness of the setting. WOTC doesnt get this. EDIT- I just don't think they care-Ghosts of Saltmarsh for example shows a lot of disregard/ignorance of the setting.

Additionally, they (WOTC) want everyone to have a shared experience of their own choosing and only pay Lip Service to the DMs doing their own homebrew settings and worlds and not supporting this style of play anymore, despite that being a core philosophy of the game since it's inception.

So yeah, lots to love/like about 2E despite the flaws. I'd rather be back in the 2E Era. It was way more exciting.



*Edit- there was the stupidity with 2E's Avatar Crisis in the FR, when they killed off the God of Assassins and the like because they eliminated the assassin class in 2E. Fortunately they stopped doing this after a year or so, and instead just said OK- here's our new setting, here is a list stuff from core AD&D that is banned because it doesn't fit.

[azera]

Mar 19, 2020 10:57:58 GMT -6 jeffb said:

I like many of the sourcebooks, the Historical reference series, the DMG series, the Von Richten's guides to the various undead.

Ah, yeah, I'd forgotten about the VRGs!  They shared the same Curse of Wordiness that's struck most TTRPG products since the mid-80s, but they were cool about looking at different ways of customizing monsters.  I think they even went beyond undead later on (I'm like 90% sure there was a VRG for golems and maybe also a VRG for fiends?), and I'm kind of a sucker for bestiaries with in-setting narrator commentary

[jeffb]

azera said:

I'm kind of a sucker for bestiaries with in-setting narrator commentary

You and me both. I love stuff like VR's guides (And Volo's Guides, for that matter). Though not technically a D&D Book- "Bestiary" for the SAGA 5th Age card RPG (Dragonlance) is fantastic. I'm not a DL fan, but I LOVE that book- narrated as if written by Caramon Majere.


Earthdawn's Creatures of Barsaive is worth looking at too- text is a translation from an Ancient Dragon's notes about the creatures of the world.

[Desparil]

Mar 19, 2020 10:57:58 GMT -6 jeffb said:

In retrospect, I think I prefer the 2E product model best- Not that all of it was great in execution, but:

TSR gave us lots of setting materials to use or not.

They gave us lots of player tools to use or not.

They gave us lots of DM tools to use or not.

Honestly, while it did produce some gems, I have to disagree - I think the 2E product model was real bad for business. Or really, maybe we should call it the BECMI product model, since it was a few years before 2E in the mid-80's that they really kicked into high gear with the Mystara Gazetteers and Hollow World supplements.

But anyway, publishing a ton of books cost a lot of money for TSR to print them all, and while they never revealed exact sales numbers there's a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that most of the supplements didn't sell super well. Incidentally, 3E, 4E, and Vampire: The Masquerade all had similarly aggressive product schedules and suffered similar fates; causing White Wolf to go bankrupt just like TSR did, whereas WotC had enough foresight and cash reserves to put out the next edition while they were still in the black and ride the big wave of PHB, DMG, and MM sales back into profitability. I suspect Paizo also saw the writing on the wall when 5E came out and started work on Pathfinder 2 to go after that same new-edition cash influx.

I think their current 5E strategy is the first time since TSR's first 10 years under Gary Gygax's presidency that D&D has had a financially sustainable product model.