Quote from: Benoist;372430There's no such thing as "canon" to me as far as RPGs are concerned. I do my thing with the products, and I expect my GM to do his own when I play (unless we're in some sort of cooperative campaign with rotative DMs and such, but even then, I want the DMs to be able to do with their universe whatever the heck they want with it, and not have to adhere to any Official (TM) Canon just because the publisher says so).

The very idea of canon, as in fictional canon, is, to me, completely antithetical to the very idea of role playing games, and the way actual gaming groups take possession of the universes they play, as they play them.

You must be very lucky that you never saw what happened to Aventuria during L'Oeil Noir Deuxième Édition...

Quote from: T. Foster;372431But I still say that there was enough bad metaplot, especially in the 1988-93 era when it overtook seemingly every commercial rpg setting, including those that had not previously been metaplot driven, to make me wary of the whole concept.

Now imagine a country where the leading game (the so-called mainstream) had a metaplot from day 2 on.

Imagine that after White Box, Holmes D&D was published in conjunction with DL1, with Krynn-isms being hard-coded into the rules. So the blue Holmes rulebook came with kender, three magic-using schools, and silvanesti and qualinesti elves, instead of the more generic class descriptions. Every adventure module (even one-shots) were set in Krynn, probably with hints to the big plot happening in the main module line. So even, say, The Keep on the Borderlands had draconians and gully dwarves, not to mention a "best before" date because after DL8 the area was officially cleared of monsters, or the evil cleric, whose mission it was to find a lost silver dragon egg, was successful and returned to Sanction, or worse, the keep has officially fallen to the blue dragon army.

Imagine a country where the community is divided along the lines of GMs who developed their own campaign settings in different fantasy flavours (players of D&D, Midgard, RM, even RQ) - and the mainstream who followed one metaplot in one late medieval/pseudo renaissance setting.
But it was exactly that metaplot that secured the position of Das Schwarze Auge as number one game in Germany. So from a marketing POV I can understand that the concept...

Quote from: T. Foster;372431... overtook seemingly every commercial rpg setting, including those that had not previously been metaplot driven

On the bright side, before AD&D 2 at least there was an AD&D 1.

Quote from: Benoist;372509Seems to me there is a disconnect between "Dark Sun" and what I think of as "Dungeons & Dragons".

Same here. TSR lost me with Dark Sun, Spelljammer, and Planescape. They almost pulled me back in with Birthright, though.

I liked Kits. The stuff they gave you tended to be way overshadowed by your basic class powers once you hit high level, but they were a nice way to give a lick of flavour to low-level characters. Were I to run a 2E game in the near future I'd honestly considering using a kits as an alternative to the skill system from 2E or the non-adventuring professions from 1E - so your skills are "whatever a [KIT NAME] would be reasonably expected to know".

I also like the core 2E rules. Assassins can easily be grafted in. Devils and Demons are a mere name-change away. They're compatible enough with 1E that you can use all that good stuff without too much trouble. Specialist wizards and priests spice up the magic system a bit.

I wasn't too keen on the modules that came out, but I've never been keen on prepublished adventures anyway, I prefer to improv (which, incidentally, 2E caters to quite nicely). My big gripes in the 2E era were as follows:

- Player's Option. Wow. That's a lot of optional rules there. Do you expect anyone to use more than a fraction of them?

- Excess settings. Far and away my biggest issue. Don't get me wrong, I love many of the 2E settings. Unfortunately, TSR got caught up in trying to support too many of them. It ended up feeling like they'd spread themselves too thin - rather than doing a small number of settings and doing them well, they tried to do a ridiculous number of settings all at once and ended up doing them all a disservice as a result.

Also, some of the settings were just a little too generic and felt redundant. Really, did we need Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance and Mystara (after basic D&D got take out to the back of the shed and shot)? Why not just settle on one "standard D&D fantasy" setting (perhaps grafting the other settings onto it, so they're in different parts of the same world), and have a few other settings based on radically different assumptions?

Were I in charge of TSR at the time, I'd have limited the 2E settings to the following:

- Forgotten Realms, for standard D&D fantasy, simply because at the time it was the most popular one (and, really, I can't tell the difference in flavour between it and 2E-era Mystara and Greyhawk and Dragonlance, so fans of those settings could just cannibalise FR stuff for all I care). Maybe with Greyhawk and Dragonlance and Mystara bolted onto different continents.

- Dark Sun, for the exotic out-there weird-dark fantasy stuff.

- Spelljammer OR Planescape for the world-hopping stuff. Possibly both, with Spelljammer being what you do at low levels before you're capable of taking on the planes.

- Al-Qadim for Arabian Nights stuff, maybe. But I'd be more likely to pull an Oriental Adventures and do a more generic "Arabian Nights Adventures" book with pointers on running an Arabian Nights-themed game in any official or homebrew setting with a suitable culture.

- Ravenloft probably wouldn't make the cut - again, I'd be more likely to do a "Gothic Adventures" book for horror-themed D&D campaigns in any setting.

- Likewise, Birthright wouldn't make the cut - I'd put out a "Royal Adventures" book with guidelines on running Birthright-type campaigns in any setting instead.

Really, I think the problem 2E had with the settings was that TSR worked on a simple (but flawed) principle: every major campaign theme deserves a separate campaign setting. And I'm sorry, but I just don't see that. To use Ravenloft as an example, I think horror-D&D is a fun idea, but I see absolutely no need to have a designated "horror" setting. Likewise, I don't see any need for an Arabian Nights style game to have an "Arabiaworld" setting just about every generic fantasy world has a Middle East-flavoured region anyway, and I don't see a need for a "Kingworld" setting to support Birthright when really any setting will do (especially if you go the WFRP route and have a "Border Princes" region where the rulers aren't officially described in any setting material). I just never saw a reason for many of the 2E settings to exist.

None of which has any reflection on the core game, however.

It is worth noting that 2E also had a reasonable showing in the "top games" list too.

Quote from: Benoist;372509I honestly didn't remember those. I don't know if I can attribute this to Dark Sun or AD&D2 in general - stepping further and further away from dungeon exploration I mean. Also, it's probably coming to my mind this way because of the way I think of D&D now that I came back to 0e and 1e, where dungeon (and wilderness) exploration -is- a major point of the game.

IDK. Seems to me there is a disconnect between "Dark Sun" and what I think of as "Dungeons & Dragons".

Possibly. I think that's because DS was published during AD&D 2e, when the emphasis from TSR in its modules was story-driven games because it encouraged people to buy more modules to get the complete "story".

DS though, is perhaps the best outdoor exploration setting published by TSR (I prefer it to Mystara, but YMMV). DS maps were always incredibly interesting, and the focus in the Wanderer's Guide / Chronicle was life outside the city states, with tons of ideas for adventure locations. If you still have the boxed sets, it's worth taking a second look at them and seeing how many things to explore are crammed into each one.

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;372523Same here. TSR lost me with Dark Sun, Spelljammer, and Planescape. They almost pulled me back in with Birthright, though.

Ugh. I'm exactly the opposite. I loved Dark Sun and Planescape, and really couldn't stand Birthright. It had some clever ideas, but it was JAFE (Just Another Fantasy Europe) and it felt particularly denuded of adventure possibilities.

Quote from: Settembrini;372517Game Daddy, only because Traveller has the bestest presentation of Metaplot ever, it does not become less Metaplot. It influenced all products coming afterward, from modules way to MegaTraveller and T:NE. And T4. And G:T!

Without the official metaplot there would be no "what ifs?". An evolving future history which still delivers the tools to deviate at any point. You can only deviate because it is there! This is awesome squared. Without Metaplot, there would be no FFW board game, and no Pocket Empires. Hammer and Nail, and an instruction for making a cabinet. What cabinet? Maybe a table isntead? You decide!

I agree with the highlighted part in particular: if you don't want Rebellion or Virus, then continue on without them. The only drawback is for those who want to use official products like adventures; it becomes necessary to adapt them to make them useful, or to play without 'official' support. I don't find either of those options to be a problem, but some gamers do.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;372526Possibly. I think that's because DS was published during AD&D 2e, when the emphasis from TSR in its modules was story-driven games because it encouraged people to buy more modules to get the complete "story".

*nod* I agree. That's part of it, at least.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;372526DS though, is perhaps the best outdoor exploration setting published by TSR (I prefer it to Mystara, but YMMV). DS maps were always incredibly interesting, and the focus in the Wanderer's Guide / Chronicle was life outside the city states, with tons of ideas for adventure locations. If you still have the boxed sets, it's worth taking a second look at them and seeing how many things to explore are crammed into each one.

That I remember, however, and I agree with this. The maps in particular were really, really interesting (gorgeous too, but that's another point altogether). I do remember feeling a bit bummed though that the maps were not center pieces somewhere in the box's design, in the sense of Hex explorations and such. But then again, we run into a major shift away from the classic hex exploration into something more of a "story" paradigm, where the narrative of exploration matters more than rolling for wandering monsters, if you get my drift.

Quote from: Warthur;372524- Excess settings. Far and away my biggest issue. Don't get me wrong, I love many of the 2E settings. Unfortunately, TSR got caught up in trying to support too many of them. It ended up feeling like they'd spread themselves too thin - rather than doing a small number of settings and doing them well, they tried to do a ridiculous number of settings all at once and ended up doing them all a disservice as a result.

Also, some of the settings were just a little too generic and felt redundant. Really, did we need Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance and Mystara (after basic D&D got take out to the back of the shed and shot)? Why not just settle on one "standard D&D fantasy" setting (perhaps grafting the other settings onto it, so they're in different parts of the same world), and have a few other settings based on radically different assumptions?

Were I in charge of TSR at the time, I'd have limited the 2E settings to the following:

- Forgotten Realms, for standard D&D fantasy, simply because at the time it was the most popular one (and, really, I can't tell the difference in flavour between it and 2E-era Mystara and Greyhawk and Dragonlance, so fans of those settings could just cannibalise FR stuff for all I care). Maybe with Greyhawk and Dragonlance and Mystara bolted onto different continents.

- Dark Sun, for the exotic out-there weird-dark fantasy stuff.

- Spelljammer OR Planescape for the world-hopping stuff. Possibly both, with Spelljammer being what you do at low levels before you're capable of taking on the planes.

- Al-Qadim for Arabian Nights stuff, maybe. But I'd be more likely to pull an Oriental Adventures and do a more generic "Arabian Nights Adventures" book with pointers on running an Arabian Nights-themed game in any official or homebrew setting with a suitable culture.

- Ravenloft probably wouldn't make the cut - again, I'd be more likely to do a "Gothic Adventures" book for horror-themed D&D campaigns in any setting.

- Likewise, Birthright wouldn't make the cut - I'd put out a "Royal Adventures" book with guidelines on running Birthright-type campaigns in any setting instead.

Really, I think the problem 2E had with the settings was that TSR worked on a simple (but flawed) principle: every major campaign theme deserves a separate campaign setting. And I'm sorry, but I just don't see that. To use Ravenloft as an example, I think horror-D&D is a fun idea, but I see absolutely no need to have a designated "horror" setting. Likewise, I don't see any need for an Arabian Nights style game to have an "Arabiaworld" setting just about every generic fantasy world has a Middle East-flavoured region anyway, and I don't see a need for a "Kingworld" setting to support Birthright when really any setting will do (especially if you go the WFRP route and have a "Border Princes" region where the rulers aren't officially described in any setting material). I just never saw a reason for many of the 2E settings to exist.

I generally agree, but to defend Ravenloft, it wasn't just a horror setting, it was also their 17th century Europe setting. It had guns and cravats. I think it had a distinct enough identity and draw to be worth keeping around.

Birthright should have been a supplement, like Council of Wyrms.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;372527Ugh. I'm exactly the opposite. I loved Dark Sun and Planescape, and really couldn't stand Birthright. It had some clever ideas, but it was JAFE (Just Another Fantasy Europe) and it felt particularly denuded of adventure possibilities.

LOL I'm in between. I loved both the original Dark Sun and Planescape boxed sets as sandboxes, basically, but never bought into any further development/products of their lines. Same thing with Birthright, though I must admit, I love the basic theme and tone of the universe, its implied game play, and well... I'm VERY much into Magical Medieval Societies, aka Medieval European mockups, myself. The more Medieval, the better, to me.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;372531I generally agree, but to defend Ravenloft, it wasn't just a horror setting, it was also their 17th century Europe setting. It had guns and cravats. I think it had a distinct enough identity and draw to be worth keeping around.

You see, I never got into it deeply enough to notice that - that got deeply buried in the marketing. I remember seeing the Masque of the Red Death product, which was meant to be a Victorian horror-style take on D&D, but I didn't realise the core setting was meant to have a 17th century feel.

So chalk one up for seriously failed marketing there.

Quote from: Benoist;372532LOL I'm in between. I loved both the original Dark Sun and Planescape boxed sets as sandboxes, basically, but never bought into any further development/products of their lines. Same thing with Birthright, though I must admit, I love the basic theme and tone of the universe, its implied game play, and well... I'm VERY much into Magical Medieval Societies, aka Medieval European mockups, myself. The more Medieval, the better, to me.

I'm much the same with Planescape - never liked the later boxes and stuff. Though I will defend the products which expanded on Sigil itself, if only because a) it's always nice to have a really detailed home base for a campaign setting and b) the more Sigil detail you had the more viable a primarily Sigil-based campaign was, and anything which made it easier to run something like Planescape: Torment is fine my me. And the metaplot really wasn't that intrusive until later on in the product line.

Quote from: T. Foster;372370Is this thread directed specifically at me? Because looking over the "Bottom 10" vote lists I'm the only person who put AD&D 2E in the #1 spot (a few others had it included lower down on their lists, and it ranked as the 15th worst game overall -- tied (fittingly ) with F.A.T.A.L.).

Nah, it wasn't directed towards anybody in particular.  The title was an exaggeration, mainly because I find it somewhat surprising that one of the bigger RPGs is so commonly reviled.

Quote from: T. Foster;372370Suffice to say that if you like 2E AD&D and had an enjoyable time playing it, good for you. Still doesn't make me think it wasn't a bad game (or, rather, a really bad edition of a pretty good game) though

I don't need your approval, nor was I looking for it, and I'm not trying to convince you of anything.  I also wasn't trying to say that you disliking it is badwrongfun.  I was simply trying to give context to my question.  I'm just interested in why people feel the way they do about it.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;372375Grognards hate 2e because it put into black & white a bunch of things that were going wrong with D&D already, viz. storification, special-snowflakification, forgetting what the archetypes were really about (aka, detachment from the roots, aka D&D emulating D&D tropes), and sanitizing of the material.

Can you expand on this at all?  Especially the "special-snowflakification" and "forgetting what the archetypes were really about," as I'm not sure I understand what you mean by those (or why).

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;3723752e however did introduce various splat-type things (Complete whatever, options books) and various settings that may have generated some ill-will.

I'd developed the impression that this was the core of where the real antipathy towards this edition developed.  Looking back I realize that the groups I played with used a little of the material from the Complete books, but not most of it.  We implemented some combat rules from the Complete Fighter and Complete Thief, as well as the pantheon-specifics from the Complete Priest, but rarely made use of kits from any of the books other than the Complete Wizard.  As a DM I got a lot of use (and still do) out of the DMGR series, as well as the historical campaign settings, buit those were setting and inspiration material, not so much what I would've called "Splat Books."  

Beyond the pieces from the 4 complete books I mentioned, we stuck to almost exclusively to base rules. Noone cared that the assasin was gone, and agreed with the idea that nearly any class could be one; you could still kill for money and kicks.  The general "sanitization" seemed mostly irrelevant as the monikers "demon" and "devil" were still present, they just weren't what those two groups called themselves.  We didn't follow canon in any of the published campaign settings, even though we used several with the attendant modules. And by the time that the Options books came out, we weren't playing nearly as often, and simply weren't touching much in the way of new material.

Does it seem reasonable to say that most people's objections weren't really in the core game (or ruleset) that AD&D 2nd was?  That a lot of it revolved around directions later books/settings took?  I happen to feel that way about 3rd and 3.5: the base game was/is pretty good, but the WoTC splat books make me want to gag - munchkin city.  Let's not even talk about Prestige Classes...

Quote from: Warthur;372533You see, I never got into it deeply enough to notice that - that got deeply buried in the marketing. I remember seeing the Masque of the Red Death product, which was meant to be a Victorian horror-style take on D&D, but I didn't realise the core setting was meant to have a 17th century feel.

So chalk one up for seriously failed marketing there.

Well to your credit, there is a major difference between the original 2nd edition boxed set and what White Wolf later did with the setting. In the former, you very much had a mix of lots of different influences and settings. Not just the 17th century feel. It was yet another attempt to link all the TSR settings together, and it borrowed from all of them heavily. That's the wonder of the boxed set IMO - a patchwork of very different types of D&D horror in a huge package. You pick and choose what you want to play with, and run with it. I really, really like Ravenloft - the original boxed set alone, again. Not the supplements.

It's White Wolf and its treatment/reboot of the setting that really brought more coherence and uniformity to the whole. Some people will think it was an awesome idea, others will think it sucked. I'm somewhere in between. If a DM tries to run WW Ravenloft by "canon", running it as written, then I'll probably be unhappy. If you draw from all the metaplot BS written for the setting (its  Gazetteers in particular) to flesh out your own take on the setting, it has serious potential.

Quote from: Benoist;372530*nod* I agree. That's part of it, at least.


That I remember, however, and I agree with this. The maps in particular were really, really interesting (gorgeous too, but that's another point altogether). I do remember feeling a bit bummed though that the maps were not center pieces somewhere in the box's design, in the sense of Hex explorations and such. But then again, we run into a major shift away from the classic hex exploration into something more of a "story" paradigm, where the narrative of exploration matters more than rolling for wandering monsters, if you get my drift.

That's true, and a fair criticism. I owned both the FR grey box and the DS box, so I used to take the hex acetate from FR and use it on the DS maps, and I found that some clever dog had set it up so that they worked almost perfectly. That let me do everything I needed to in terms of tracking how far PCs got in a day. Then I just came up with some random encounter tables (I didn't have the monster compendium things, they might've had some random encounter tables in them) and everything was kosher.

Odd that a lot of complaints seem to be round modules, settings and supplements. All optional stuff you totally don't need.

For me 2e was just a streamlined form of AD&D with more character flexibility. As I said someplace else the flexibility was good becuase it was much more roleplay based flexibility than power play. Kits didn't really make you tough (that daft tree armed tree ranger aside) they just fleshed out more stuff. Priest spheres made priests weaker if anything.
The extra non-weapon proficiencies were crudely done but definitely an improvement.

Now Skills and Powers was broken. and after that I wasn't buying any product because I was at Uni and running my own stuff.

The stuff about devils and demons is incredibly trivial and at least by me totally ignored.

When 3e came out we tired it but all the stuff folks bitch about with 4e we found was true of 3, battlemap and minis focus, optimisation of build choices etc etc. So we didn't pursue it and instead stuck to 2e.

Quote from: Bobloblah;372535Does it seem reasonable to say that most people's objections weren't really in the core game (or ruleset) that AD&D 2nd was?  That a lot of it revolved around directions later books/settings took?  I happen to feel that way about 3rd and 3.5: the base game was/is pretty good, but the WoTC splat books make me want to gag - munchkin city.  Let's not even talk about Prestige Classes...

Sort of, but considering that the things that I like and think are good about 2E AD&D are all present in other editions (1E AD&D and BECMI D&D), what distinguishes it from those editions in my mind are the differences, all of which IMO fall on the negative side of the ledger.

Say 2E AD&D is 80% (for the sake of argument, it may be a little more or a little less) identical with 1E AD&D. Some people like those 20% differences and think they improved the game (that was obviously the intent, and most of those changes are things that were already widespread as 1E house-rules and in RPGA play), but for me only 5% (at most) count as actual improvements and the other 15% are either net-neutral changes (it's different but not in a way that is particularly better or worse) or negative (IMO 2E screwed up something that was better in 1E). Plus, at least IMO, the changes 2E made especially to assumed playstyle (focusing more on story-type adventures and less on dungeon- and hex-crawling) meant that there's another 20% or so of the rules that weren't changed from 1E but should have been -- things that made sense in the 1E context but don't in the 2E context.

So, to me, 2E took a game that was 90% good and turned it into a game that's at most ~65% good. While a 65% good game is still pretty good in the overall scheme of things (and was enough to keep me playing 2E for about a year), it's a whole lot less than 90%, and that stuck in my craw, especially since the evolution was gradual and incremental enough (not something like D&D 4E or WFRP 3E where the new edition is obviously a completely different game from the previous one and it's a conscious decision to either move forward or stay behind) that it had a pernicious influence and made me forget why it was that I liked A/D&D in the first place. When I dropped 2E and moved on to other games I wasn't specifically dropping 2E, I was dropping A/D&D, because I felt it was lame and stupid and no longer fun. It wasn't until a few years later, after I'd made a clean break and put some distance between myself and D&D and was able to look back at it with a fresh perspective that I realized that it wasn't that D&D as a whole was lame and stupid and no longer fun, it was just 2E AD&D -- that OD&D, 1E AD&D, and even BECMI D&D still had all the things I liked about them in the first place, they had just been obscured and tainted by the association with 2E.

And so I tend to have an exaggerated negative emotional reaction to 2E (doing stuff like putting it #1 on my list of all-time worst rpgs ) out of proportion to its actual negative qualities.