Quote from: Elliot Wilen;373522So, what is the best of 2e, rules-wise?

See. That's my problem with 2e itself (regardless of the big picture). I struggle to find an answer to this question. I think it's a fine system in and of itself, but I can't really spell out any "WHOA this totally grabbed me by its awesome" moment for me, rules-wise. It's a bland D&D system, to me.

Quote from: Benoist;373540Actually, I go against the popular choice, there. I loved the Player's Option books when I found out about them (i.e. when they came out, actually), and still think that they were great, exactly as they were intended: toolboxes destined to make whatever you want out of the fairly tight system that was AD&D. On the actual implementation it did suck, but the intent to provide tools for people to customize mechanical aspects of the game, be able to play monsters, etc was a good one, IMO.

Giving "points for effort" is a pretty low standard. As I mentioned in one or the other of these threads, almost all of the 2E stuff sounded good in theory, it was just the actual products themselves that sucked. My semi-serious advice to people wanting to draw inspiration from 2E stuff is to read the back-cover or catalog blurb, spend a few minutes flipping through the book, and then put it back and go make up your own stuff (rules/setting/adventure) based on the same idea. Chances are it will be just as good as what TSR produced, maybe even better (and a lot cheaper too)

Quote from: jrients;373526I thought the Fighter, Cleric, and Mage books were alright.  The Cleric book is great if you want to trick out priests of specific deities or cults.  The Mage book is probably the weakest of the three.  I don't recall ever doing anything with the Thief book.

I recall the Complete Thief being my favourite of the bunch. Fighter and Wizard were very good as well.

Most of them were at least decent, though I recall the Bard book introducing some seriously overpowered kits. Bladesinger, IIRC?

Quote from: T. Foster;373544Giving "points for effort" is a pretty low standard. As I mentioned in one or the other of these threads, almost all of the 2E stuff sounded good in theory, it was just the actual products themselves that sucked. My semi-serious advice to people wanting to draw inspiration from 2E stuff is to read the back-cover or catalog blurb, spend a few minutes flipping through the book, and then put it back and go make up your own stuff (rules/setting/adventure) based on the same idea. Chances are it will be just as good as what TSR produced, maybe even better (and a lot cheaper too)

Well yeah, you're right. It is a low standard.
I guess it's a glass half full/half empty kind of thing, here.

As for your advice, I do indeed think, semi-jokingly, that it'd work in a vast majority of cases. Which is saying much, I guess.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;373522So, what is the best of 2e, rules-wise? Obviously you'd want the dmg, phb, and hardcover mm. The Player's Option books should be skipped. The Complete books are what worry/puzzle me.

I thought the Player's Option books were garbage, myself.  I didn't really discover them until about a year ago (though I knew of them when they came out), though, and I'm sure 3.0 coloured my judgement.

PHB, DMG and MM are required, and are all good.  Personally, I'd say that beyond that it's all truly optional.  If you want a little more depth to the rules, check out the Complete Fighter/Thief/Priest/Wizard.  They add a lot of interesting options without (for the most part) going over the top.  Tome of Magic is also good, but I didn't really find anything essential in it.

I've also gotten a lot of use out of many of the DMGR series of DM supplements.  They aren't actually rules supplements, but Campaign Sourcebook, Creative Campaigning, and the Book of Villains still saw lots of use.  The HR series of "historical" supplements have also been great.  Note that I put historical in quotes here, because they are by no means scholarly historical references.  Even so, as long as noone in your group is a jerk, they present more than enough material to run a campaign in the desired time period, even including options for different styles of play (historical, mythical, fantasy).  They include both fluff and crunch.

As others have mentioned, where AD&D2nd really shines is in its settings; NOT its modules, mind you, but the setting material (although some of the setting-specific modules are quite good).  I think a lot of people look at those settings that are stylistically or substantively uninteresting to them and proclaim that they are awful.  This misses the point, I think.  As an analogy, I can appreciate a piece of music from a genre I intensely dislike; my distaste doesn't necessarily override the quality of the playing/composition/lyrics/what have you.  You need to decide what kind of setting grabs you, of course, but if the style of Planescape/Dark Sun/Ravenloft/Al'Qadim/Spelljammer/Birth Right interest you, you will likely find that they are all very well done.

I'm working on rebuilding my 2E collection myself - I remember there was a line of supplements with blue covers that supplemented the DMG in the same way as the brown "Complete" series supplemented the PHB - are any of those good? The only one I have is The Complete Book of Villains, which has essentially no new rules but is a fantastic discussion of how to use villainous NPCs in a game. Likewise, I'd be interested to hear about which of the green-covered books in a similar style (the ones which were guides to building settings based around particular period in Earth's history) were good.

As far as my own supplement recommendations go, like I say, the Complete Book of Villains is good for GMing advice. The Complete Psionicist's Handbook is great if you want to add psionics to 2E - or even 1E, since in my book it's a far better take than 1E presented. The World Builder's Guidebook and the Dungeon Builder's Guidebook are excellent prep aids - I especially liked that the WBG let you start at any point, whether you were taking a top-down or bottom-up approach.

Quote from: Warthur;373557I'm working on rebuilding my 2E collection myself - I remember there was a line of supplements with blue covers that supplemented the DMG in the same way as the brown "Complete" series supplemented the PHB - are any of those good? The only one I have is The Complete Book of Villains, which has essentially no new rules but is a fantastic discussion of how to use villainous NPCs in a game. Likewise, I'd be interested to hear about which of the green-covered books in a similar style (the ones which were guides to building settings based around particular period in Earth's history) were good.

As far as my own supplement recommendations go, like I say, the Complete Book of Villains is good for GMing advice. The Complete Psionicist's Handbook is great if you want to add psionics to 2E - or even 1E, since in my book it's a far better take than 1E presented. The World Builder's Guidebook and the Dungeon Builder's Guidebook are excellent prep aids - I especially liked that the WBG let you start at any point, whether you were taking a top-down or bottom-up approach.

See my previous post.  I don't know WBG and DBG well enough to be sure, but it sounds like DMGR1, 2 and 5 are similar.  Feel free to ask if you have any specific questions.

I think it's unlikely I'll actually run out and purchase any 2e stuff. Some of you may have heard me whine about running out of room on my bookshelves...and for something AD&D-ish, I've already got 1e, Talislanta, Palladium Fantasy 1e, and Bard's Atlantis/Arcanum games.

BUT, jibbajibba's post on Complete Priest way upthread was pretty interesting. It seems to nicely widen the scope of the D&D Cleric...to me, I think that would be essential as a reason to use 2e instead of one of the above. But having done that, now the other classes might seem too 1-dimensional or underpowered. Thus the question. There are so f-in' many of the other books. (And that doesn't even include "optional core" books in Wayne's categorization, such as Tome of Magic.)

Why do we need a special book on what are already specialty classes like Bards, Rangers, Paladins, and Druids?

I guess basically what I'm wondering now, after seeing advice on which ones you like: does it unbalance the game to use a Complete book for one class without using the others? Or were the designers bright enough to make it so that e.g. fighters get proficiencies but also start from a lower baseline?

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;373522So, what is the best of 2e, rules-wise? Obviously you'd want the dmg, phb, and hardcover mm. The Player's Option books should be skipped. The Complete books are what worry/puzzle me.

PO:Combat & Tactics has some good stuff like expanded weapons tables that fixed damage on some weapons like crossbows, miniatures use, and lots of pretty good rules for combat actions from overbearing to martial arts.  The new combat system that takes up half the book is pretty terrible though.

PO:Spells & Magic doesn't have a ton of good stuff, except for one big one.  In the 2e core books they totally fucked up the priest sphere spell lists.  They gave a lot of spells that should be druid only to priests and vice versa.  Spells & Magic finally fixed the lists.

PO:Skills & Powers just didn't sit right with me.  I read it when it came out and sold it off soon after.  Seemed like they got too ambitious with core system changes.  

The Complete books have a lot of good fluff and the kits are easily modified if over/underpowered.  Kits were originally mostly role-play oriented and didn't have a lot of powerful perks until later.  We used them as they came out and didn't have any problems with balance, although I had to tone down some of the later kits.  

And yeah, Tome of Magic rocks.

Dang, I just noticed that the Historical Reference books cover some bitching historical periods. I may just have to start collecting those.

Quote from: jibbajibba;373531The complete bard has some great RP ideas.

Yeah, i played a bitchin' Thespian Bard for a while.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;373595I think it's unlikely I'll actually run out and purchase any 2e stuff. Some of you may have heard me whine about running out of room on my bookshelves...and for something AD&D-ish, I've already got 1e, Talislanta, Palladium Fantasy 1e, and Bard's Atlantis/Arcanum games.

BUT, jibbajibba's post on Complete Priest way upthread was pretty interesting. It seems to nicely widen the scope of the D&D Cleric...to me, I think that would be essential as a reason to use 2e instead of one of the above. But having done that, now the other classes might seem too 1-dimensional or underpowered. Thus the question. There are so f-in' many of the other books. (And that doesn't even include "optional core" books in Wayne's categorization, such as Tome of Magic.)

Why do we need a special book on what are already specialty classes like Bards, Rangers, Paladins, and Druids?

I guess basically what I'm wondering now, after seeing advice on which ones you like: does it unbalance the game to use a Complete book for one class without using the others? Or were the designers bright enough to make it so that e.g. fighters get proficiencies but also start from a lower baseline?

Well stuff like the Complete bard that gives you riddle masters, thespians etc, or the complete thief with Spies, acrobats, etc it really is all pretty great for sparking off ideas and the early kits at least where not power creep they were roleplay stuff. From the fighter, the peasant hero gets a place he can hide out and a reaction bonus from peasants, the myrmidon (professional soldier) gets build fires and maybe an extra weapon slot or something. they also show how you can introduce stuff like barbarians, samuria etc etc without having to build a whole new class and without having to give it loads of new uber powers.

I personally would have (and do in play) drop druid as a class and run them as preists of a nature god, so I don't find the spehres too bad. I do think not doing that as an official rule was a bit weak though.

Skills and powers was a great idea poorly executed (unlike Foster I think a fair bit of hte rest of it was pretty well executed) the concept being that you ahve a toolkit that lets you build any class you like. from a points system. So say you play a game based in The Wounded Land you can make a class for Bloodguard, if you play in a renaissance world you can make a musketeer class... etc ... the idea was that you picked HD (d4 thru d12) you picked thaco level advancement 1/1 down to 1/5, you picked spells etc etc ... So the final tool should have been grerat. However, they based hte points for each class on a base class and a preist just had too many. I mean you could make a priest to a god of theives who had thief skilsl nearly  as good as an equiv thief Plus d8hd, clerical spealls etc etc ... and that is broken]

As an idea though I think it works you just need to scale everything so the base classes turn up as you like them and the point socres work out even.

The Player's/DM's Options were a good idea with a lot of implementation problems.  But the core idea of "let's make D&D point buy" was solid.  I wrote a whole "let's fix it and make it truly classless" version my group used that's still up on the Web: http://www.mindspring.com/~ernestm/classless/

For some reason, 3e was the end of major house rulings for us.  A little of that was that it added some stuff (like perception) we had been house ruling, but also I think that's where it got heavy and complex enough that if you messed with more than adding some feats or whatnot you really threw it out of whack.   But in 2e, it was kitbash city!

Quote from: jibbajibba;373616Well stuff like the Complete bard that gives you riddle masters, thespians etc

And they were the only supplements coming out really so other stuff was shoehorned in - I remember the Bard book fondly because it had a great huge set of tables to generate a very in-depth random PC/NPC.

QuoteI guess basically what I'm wondering now, after seeing advice on which ones you like: does it unbalance the game to use a Complete book for one class without using the others?

As written, some of the Complete books power up characters significantly, while others actually power them down. We could have whole other flame wars about which classes are strongest and why but in my opinion:
*Complete Fighter upgrades the fighter, and is pretty good.
*Complete Bard powers up the bard considerably thanks to the kits - e.g. the Blade, and potentially the Gypsy (free psionic power). Also expands bard multiclass options and race options.
*Rogue is interesting, but doesn't really strengthen them that I noticed. I've heard complaints that the Swashbuckler kit is broken, since it lets rogues get fighter THACO and also keep their faster level progression.
*Complete Priest downpowers the standard cleric and most variants are weaker.
*Racial handbooks have multiclass kits which have often been considered broken.
*Psionics Handbook is potentially ripe for rules abuse, though if you have low-stat games they will futz their power rolls most of the time. So, IMHO its fine as a class as long as you're not playing Dark Sun
EDIT: and I have no idea regarding the Paladin or Ranger books.
My favourite other 2e book is Creative Campaigning - lots of ideas for the DM.