When 2E came out it was heavily embraced by my friends and me, mostly because it cleaned up a lot of the cruft in 1E that was just bad. However in retrospect 2E ended up being pretty bland, where remembering back to 1E the classes, art, magic, and feel of it still stands out to me. Then when TSR went into its death spiral and starting pumping out book after book, 2E became a complete splat book mess. At the same time other game systems with better base unified mechanics were just getting stronger and stronger. That's pretty much when I left D&D.

So 30 years later looking back there's nothing really to appeal to me with 2E. Bland art/flavor, bloat, and poor mechanics pushing me into better games at the time. 1E may have poor mechanics, but it also had a soul and the poor mechanics just felt like the norm for that era.

I've gone back and re-read the 2e rules with more modern (and personally better) rules understanding and there's some things I really like in 2e that I understand were also from 1e.  In particular I much prefer the implementation of saving throws compared to how they've been handled in the WotC era.

For me, 2e was a series of disappointments that went on until I quit buying 2e products.

It started as soon as I brought the core books home from the store. I remember sitting at the dining room table going through them, excited and wanting to like them, and as I read having a sinking feeling. The writing and presentation of the rules was clear (clearer than 1e), but the writing was also dry and all the "magic" of it was missing. And while the rules were clear, where the rules had been altered from 1e, I usually found the alterations lesser or poorly implemented. And I hated the art. I was astounded by the 2e DMG. The 1e DMG, for all its flaws, is a masterpiece and an essential RPG work. The 2e DMG was a feeble shadow, in comparison.

I did approve of some of the things 2e tried to do, but I think it did those things poorly. A good example is specialist magic-users. The 1e books mentioned the concept of specialist magic-users leveraging the various categories of magic. And it provided an example in the form the illusionist sub-class. I think the concept of specialist magic-users is great. But the 2e rules took that concept and delivered a dry, boring, by-the-numbers implementation that I think fails to live up to the concept's potential. I'd much prefer detailed sub-classes, perhaps with their own idiosyncrasies and rules, over 2e's approach.

Another example is combat. The 2e rules "cleaned up" the initiative and combat rules, making them clearer, but it also altered them in a few ways (some subtle, some more obvious) and I found that the changes -- while definitely clearer -- missed the mark. Again, I prefer taking the messy, poorly edited combat rules from 1e and making my own sense of them over the approach that 2e presented.

I'm trying to recall things 2e changed that I didn't like. A lot of the changes contributed towards a different style or approach to play that didn't work as well for my game. For example, the way XP is awarded in 2e (although I believe XP for GP was still presented as an optional rule). The damage cap on spells like fireball. The changes to multi-classed spellcasters and armor. The "story-based" play advice (compared to 1e's more exploration/problem-solving/combat focus). The general bowdlerization of the game (removing assassins, demon/devil changes, etc). There were a lot of "little" changes that don't seem like much individually, but when all of them are added up they become more significant. When combined with the change in tone and play focus, it's even more significant. One could argue that 1e and 2e are "almost the same game", and that's true, to some extent. Unfortunately, the fact that they are so similar is part of the problem, for me. 2e is *almost* like 1e, and if you squint at it you can almost convince yourself it's the same thing...but ultimately it's not. The similarity makes the variances more of an issue, in an odd way.

In general, I think core 2e felt like a "smoothed out" version of the game. It was clearer, more consistent, and had fewer rough edges, but in sanding it down and smoothing it out it lost the flavor and "magic" of the 1e rules and rulebooks. The 1e rules and rulebooks inspire and excite me. The 2e rulebooks bore me. To me, 2e comes off like tape recording of an original song where someone has made multiple degrading copies of the original and added in a few overdubs, and made a few cuts, here and there. And maybe added a different drumbeat, moving the song in a different direction. To me, it's like a pale shadow of the real thing.

As I mentioned, above, eventually I quit buying 2e product because the disappointments didn't stop with the core rule books. I know you wanted the thread focused on the core rules, so I won't go into detail, but I found the 2e product lines (adventures, etc) to mostly be craptastic. Again, I remember seeing products in the store, buying them thinking "maybe this one will be cool...", and coming away disappointed. It took me a surprisingly long time before I realized TSR had taken AD&D in a direction that I didn't want to go, but when I finally came to terms with that I simply quit buying.

I know 2e has its fans. Maybe it works great for some people. I'm okay with that; I have no intention of arguing about subjective preferences. But it definitely isn't for me.

Quote from: Lynn;1139336The binder thing sure seems like someone made a decision without consulting all parts of the company.

I think the binder approach had potential, but it was poorly implemented ("poorly implemented" seems to be a go-to criticism of 2e, for me).

I'd have looked at a much smaller form factor for the binder. And not one page per monster, but one *leaf* per monster, with the stat block and description on one side and a full-sized illustration on the other. (That would let you truly insert new monsters into the correct position/order.) And the sheets should not be bound together with perforation (such that the customer has to separate them before inserting them into the binder -- almost certainly tearing them and ending up with ragged edges), they should be individual sheets.

Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;1140213And the sheets should not be bound together with perforation (such that the customer has to separate them before inserting them into the binder -- almost certainly tearing them and ending up with ragged edges), they should be individual sheets.

   I never owned the original Monstrous Compendium--by the time I was able to buy my own D&D books, the Monstrous Manual was out--but all the Appendices I bought were individual sheets.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1140216I never owned the original Monstrous Compendium--by the time I was able to buy my own D&D books, the Monstrous Manual was out--but all the Appendices I bought were individual sheets.

The original came with a bound (perfect bound?) booklet that had very poor perforations for you to tear out the individual sheets. It was awful. Glad to hear they didn't do that with the appendices.

Quote from: VisionStorm;1140182I freaking loved the Complete Handbook series. I had almost all of them. People sometimes whine about the Kits, but they were not even remotely as unbalanced as the Players Option stuff. And while I agree that they were inconsistent and had some balance issues, they added a lot of flavor to the character classes without turning every freaking concept into a completely new and separate class (like in 3e). I still have a bunch of the books lying around to this day.

I remember really loving the Complete Bard. My feeling is the 2E books had enough flavor and were not pure splat books like the later 3E versions (the Complete books had value to both players and GMs in 2E, whereas for 3E, like most of their books, they were all player oriented and as a GM you felt like you were obligated to get them just to keep up). Absolutely hated WOTCs focus on crunch. I think they did some good things initially (the whole return to the dungeon idea was definitely needed). But so much of the 3E line seemed to sneer at flavor and providing the GM with anything approaching inspirational material.

Oh yeah. The Complete Handbooks also included a lot of information about how to run campaigns focused around certain classes or races, or how to integrate them better into the campaign. The Complete Bard's Handbook included a bunch of details on different types of music, musical instruments, or performance styles even beyond music (juggling, acting, chanting, etc.), expanded guidelines for bonus XP awards dealing with bardic stuff, like giving out performances or using class abilities. It also included a lot of details on role playing bards, gaining fame or infamy, fan reactions--even the possibility of gaining a stalker who loved the bard too much and could potentially try to kill them out of jealousy or feeling slighted by the bard. Every Complete Handbook was loaded with that type of stuff. It wasn't just class abilities, but a complete resource for how integrate or get the most out of a specific class or race, from both, a player's and campaign/DMing point of view.

Quote from: Slipshot762;1140176The complete handbook series of splats had very nicely textured covers, well, some did at least. Some sort of leathery-vinyl type stuff that was quite durable.

Yep, and the Encyclopedia Magica books.  I loved those.