Lots to like about the 2E system:

* Excellent layout and presentation of rules
* THACO instead of tables
* Thieves (skill points) are an improvement on 1E
* Priests (domains) are an improvement on 1E
* Wizards (schools, cantrips) are an improvement on 1E
* Greater breadth and balance to the spells

But online discussions about 2E are always muddied by feelings about the passing of 1E, and mixing in the system with the supplements (though my Night Below campaign with 2E is one of the best RPG experiences I've had).

The system itself is an improvement on 1E, and more accessible than 3E. In fact, if I had to choose a D&D system using rules as written from the core books only, I'd be hard-pressed to choose between 2E and Moldvay B/X.

Quote from: RPGPundit;276153So, is there anything 2e has as a game, that 1e or D&D basic/expert or OD&D did NOT have, that made it really a better game?

If you believe so, besides explaining just what that something was, did that something also carry through to 3e or 4e?

RPGPundit

What is this, Dragonsfoot?

Quote from: noisms;276201Online grognardish hatred for 2e stems almost entirely from lingering distaste over how Gary Gygax was treated and dislike of aesthetic choices. It's nothing to do with the game itself.

That may be true for a portion of the online hate, but it's not true of all the dislike.

When 2e was released, I was excited about it. I picked up the new books as they appeared, and introduced them to my groups. The first group was my original D&D group. I only DMed that group occasionally. The second was the group I DMed.

The first group met 2e with an utter lack of enthusiasm. We played for a brief while, until they'd had enough. The main reason that was given for this was that they simply disliked the changes made to the game. I can't recall the specifics, as this was pushing twenty years ago, but they had detailed issues with the changes between editions. Don't ask me why; I actually didn't see why the problems were, indeed, problems. Regardless, this group didn't play 2e after that point. This had nothing to do with Gygax; hell, at that time, we weren't even aware Gygax was no longer at TSR - news like that didn't trickle down to us, perhaps due to the fact that we didn't have a game shop to get such news. We bought our books at places like Waldenbooks or Kay-Bee toy stores. Anyway, the apathy this group had for 2e did stem from the game itself.

The second group took to it pretty well, mostly because I was the DM and introduced the game in a way that didn't draw attention. This was done, as I recall, because of the problem I had with the first group. I was the closest thing to a rules-lawyer in the second group, knew the rules the best, and was almost exclusively the only DM. I don't recall anyone else ever having their own copy of the books at the table. So I could channel in the changes at a pace that wouldn't be very obtrusive.

I think the later glut of material was very off-putting. As mentioned above, a lot of the splatbooks simply weren't written to a common standard. You had the Thief book, for example, that had a lot of kits that gave no benefits or drawbacks, and then the Bard book that had a bunch of kits that created what were essentially new classes. Then the Player's Option series offered a whole slew of changes that could throw a game out of whack. One could simply stick with the core, but damn, those books were very dry reading, and didn't inspire the players.

And there is what I felt was the main problem with 2e - the books just weren't fun to read. They read like textbooks. 3e's core books also suffered from this, but the system had been overhauled enough that it could spark enthusiasm just with the mechanics.

Related to this last bit, I remember being very disappointed that some of the stuff I really liked that had been introduced in the 1e era (in Unearthed Arcana, to be specific) was left out of 2e. I remember missing the barbarian quite a bit, as well as the cavalier. Removing cool bits like that, and doing away with the Gygax-speak in the rulebooks that lent a warmth to them that was appealing to read, were the first things that eventually had me leaving D&D behind, until 3e.

I don't find anything particularly wrong with the edition, per se, but it rather falls outside of the purpose of the Citadel of Chaos forums.

That said, I will be stea...  errr...  finding a good deal of inspiration from 2e for use in Alternate Character Sets.  to quote:

Quote from: Premier- The various Complete splatbooks are good for cherry-picking. They're pretty horrid if you just adopt all of them uncritically, but many of them contain good stuff.

I will extend that to include all the accessories.  I can't recall a single supplement of any stripe that was utterly useless, although some came close, which made it difficult to justify the cost.

AD&D 2e was an improvement in almost every way over 1e.

* The writing was clear and concise.
* The art was better.  
* The settings were better.
* The character classes were better balanced.  And they got rid of the pointless, over-powered classes.
* Combat was streamlined (I'm still not convinced anyone actually ran 1e combat by the book - I've never seen it).
* There were a lot more spell options.
* Characters had much more customization options.
* The Monstrous Manual was by far superior and the best collection of monsters from any edition.
* There were way more optional rules, allowing you to customize the game.

IMO, the only thing 1e had over 2e was that it used the names of "devil" and "demon" instead of those stupid substitutions they came up with.  That's pretty much it.  

That, and perhaps the little extra flavor that was added from Gygax - but that had very little to do with the game itself and as often as not made the books harder to read/use as a game.  And personally, I want game books to read like instruction manuals.  They should tell me how to play the game, not try to be interesting to read.  If I want something interesting to read, that's what novels are for.

Quote from: jgants;276233That, and perhaps the little extra flavor that was added from Gygax - but that had very little to do with the game itself and as often as not made the books harder to read/use as a game.  And personally, I want game books to read like instruction manuals.  They should tell me how to play the game, not try to be interesting to read.  If I want something interesting to read, that's what novels are for.

That works for Monopoly, but not for games that are trying to get players into the mindset of characters living and adventuring in a fantastic realm. Inspiring people to play should be the first goal of a game book, not just simply relating the rules.

The Cavalier and Barbarian weren't pointless. They both appeared later in both 2e and 3e due to interest in them. Plus, the Barbarian was balanced in 3e, and the Cavalier, while on paper was loaded down with goodies, didn't do all that well in actual play in the 2e era.

Quote from: noisms;276201Online grognardish hatred for 2e stems almost entirely from lingering distaste over how Gary Gygax was treated and dislike of aesthetic choices. It's nothing to do with the game itself.

I didn't like the art (which emphasized romantic fantasy over adventurous fantasy), I didn't like the DM's advice, and I didn't like aesthetic choices about things like removing demons and devils and so on, so yeah, that pretty much describes me. Also they removed the random dungeon tables in 2e that existed in 1e.

• I never liked the Assassin class, so I was glad that they removed it.  
• I like that it used real world measurements (feet) rather than the old wargame measurement (inches).  
• I like that demi-humans were given higher level caps.  
• Removing the to-hit charts and replacing with them with just THAC0 was brilliant.  
• The Thief class was given more customization and flexibility in choosing which Thief abilities to develop and which ones not to develop.  
• The Proficiency system was hammered out from the 1e supplements, and really used to it's potential in the Complete series of supplements.  It gave D&D a skill system, even though it wasn't called that.
• I dislike the removal of the half-orc race, and the changes to demons and devils.  I understand the reasoning behind these decisions, given the context of the time period.
• I like the customizable class building tool-kit.

The modularity of the system. You could strip it down to Basic D&D levels or ramp it up to near 3e retardation, you could also play anything from low level gritty fantasy to Ultra high fantasy. The artwork of Elmore, Parkinson, and a couple of others really nailed the look of fantasy gaming for my group.

The splatbook glut that many complain about only happened near the end of its life cycle when TSR started to flounder and attempted to wring ever last dime out of the franchise (sometime after the release of the inferior black books with their crappy art).

Quote from: jgants;276233AD&D 2e was an improvement in almost every way over 1e.

* The writing was clear and concise. (Meh)
* The art was better. (Meh)
* The settings were better. (More prolific, too)
* The character classes were better balanced.  And they got rid of the pointless, over-powered classes. (Disagree)
* Combat was streamlined (I'm still not convinced anyone actually ran 1e combat by the book - I've never seen it). (Disagree)
* There were a lot more spell options. (Agree)
* Characters had much more customization options. (Agree, conditionally)
* The Monstrous Manual was by far superior and the best collection of monsters from any edition. (See Below)
* There were way more optional rules, allowing you to customize the game. (Agree)

That, and perhaps the little extra flavor that was added from Gygax - but that had very little to do with the game itself and as often as not made the books harder to read/use as a game.  And personally, I want game books to read like instruction manuals.  They should tell me how to play the game, not try to be interesting to read.  If I want something interesting to read, that's what novels are for.

And a 'disagree' with the last point.  I rather like RPG rules to be somewhat more prosaic, for the reasons cited by the Colonel.

As to the Monstrous Manual, I think that epitomizes the overall problem I perceive with 2e:  Great ideas, poor execution.  The Monstrous Manuals were a great idea, and when they were announced, I was totally jazzed.  Loose leaf pages, one monster per sheet.  Oooops.  Turns out it was loose leaf all right, but there were several pages in each pack that had a monster on the front, and a different monster on the back.  The core idea was to have the one monster per sheet.  Once they botched that, the loose leaf pages were far less useful.  I still organized a couple of custom listings, but there were several monsters in them I didn't really want.

And that plagued the whole product, really.  Kits? Fantastic.  Implementing them?  Nightmare.  Specialist mage?  Great.  Enchanters?  Suck.  It's not so much a matter of balance, really, as making it work as a whole.  Barring any access whatsoever to an opposition school made certain specialties only useful in certain situations.  "Duh", right?  Well, they rather neglected to mention that.  "An enchanter will be most useful in urban settings; Invocation spells are highly useful to an adventuring party that expects a good deal of combat".  Or whatever the opposition to invocation/evocation was.  I will look it up later.  Severely limiting the number of opposition school spells would have been better, or providing a save bonus for the target of opposition school spells.

Well, that is a whole other blog entry.  But that summarizes my position.  

Oh two things I did like in 2e for no good reason whatsoever:

1) The Wild Mage

2) The Sha'ir

Quote from: jeff37923;276168There was a section in the middle of the 2e DMG which showed you how to create custom character classes. I liked that part and wish that it was ported over to 3e and 4e (I know you can figure it out, but you were never told how to "Do It Yourself").

You might find Perfect20 useful for that: here.

I remember being very enthused about the 2e version (although at that time I didn't play regularly). However the execution might have been faulty - someone made a class which needs 0 XP to advance a level [this page has a tedious hate-on for D&D btw]. Maybe it works better if the DM makes the classes based on their world.

By the way someone also made an unofficial version of this for Basic D&D, which is here.

Thanks for the links Age of Fable!  I hadn't see the BD&D custom class article before.

Quote from: ColonelHardisson;276235That works for Monopoly, but not for games that are trying to get players into the mindset of characters living and adventuring in a fantastic realm. Inspiring people to play should be the first goal of a game book, not just simply relating the rules.

Well, ideally, you'd be inspiring people to play by making the rules themselves interesting (see 4e for a good example).  I think purple prose works (sometimes) for the first time you read a book.  After that, one tends to want to actually be able to locate all the rules quickly for reference, rather than stopping a game for 15 min to play a minigame text version of "Where's Waldo?"

I don't think 1e was terrible about that (that would be White Wolf's games).  But 2e was certainly better at layout than 1e was.

Quote from: ColonelHardisson;276235The Cavalier and Barbarian weren't pointless. They both appeared later in both 2e and 3e due to interest in them. Plus, the Barbarian was balanced in 3e, and the Cavalier, while on paper was loaded down with goodies, didn't do all that well in actual play in the 2e era.

I was talking about 1e core vs. 2e core, actually.

2e changed the Bard into something actually playable, got rid of the Monk (which never fit well into the setting anyway), got rid of the Assassin (which was basically a bad version of a thief), and expanded the options for Specialist Wizards instead of just having the Illusionist.  Not much loss there.

But, OK, let's look at Unearthed Arcana.  First off, I've never understood the love some people have for UA.  To me, it's quite possibly one of the worst official supplements for any version of D&D ever.  It's quite possibly the biggest jumbled mess of a rulebook expansion of all time.

As for the classes, Thief-Acrobat was as big of a mess as the 1e Bard was, Barbarian was a horribly over-powered version of a Fighter, and Cavalier was just Paladin-lite.

Quote from: StormBringer;276244And a 'disagree' with the last point.  I rather like RPG rules to be somewhat more prosaic, for the reasons cited by the Colonel.

As to the Monstrous Manual, I think that epitomizes the overall problem I perceive with 2e:  Great ideas, poor execution.  The Monstrous Manuals were a great idea, and when they were announced, I was totally jazzed.  Loose leaf pages, one monster per sheet.  Oooops.  Turns out it was loose leaf all right, but there were several pages in each pack that had a monster on the front, and a different monster on the back.  The core idea was to have the one monster per sheet.  Once they botched that, the loose leaf pages were far less useful.  I still organized a couple of custom listings, but there were several monsters in them I didn't really want.

I was talking about the Monstrous Manual (the HB book), not the Monstrous Compendiums.  I agree that the execution was off with the compendiums.

Quote from: jgants;276262I was talking about the Monstrous Manual (the HB book), not the Monstrous Compendiums.  I agree that the execution was off with the compendiums.

Ah, I don't think I had the chance to get my hands on that.  Likely, because it further failed to deliver on the convenience of the Monstrous Compendiums, in my perception.  I will take your word that it was more useful than I presumed.