It continues to come as a great shock to me that whenever 2E is brought up online (either forums or blogs) it usually comes with negative connotations.  From what I have seen, the complaints are of two main varieties: "2E took away all that was good about 1E" or "2E was the crap we had to deal with before the glory of 3E".  To me, these arguments just boil down to "2e isn't 1e" and "2e isn't 3e".  Well, of course it isn't 1e or 3e, it's 2e!

Now, of course I may be biased since I was introduced to the hobby with 2e.  Yet even though I have played other editions of D&D, 2e still remains my ideal version of D&D.  So it really confuses me when I see people touting it as the "worst edition of D&D".  Why is it the worst edition?  1e has Gygaxianism, 3e has streamlined rules, but to me 2e had wonderful worlds to explore and a much cleaned up version of AD&D rules.  Each edition has their benefits and differences I feel, and of course we are all predisposed towards one edition over another, but why all the hate for 2e?  Is there seriously no love for 2e?  If you love 2e, please prove me wrong!

Too much wink-wink railroading, too many piles of padded hackwork books. Too little attention to the realities of play. There were plenty of good ideas coming out over the run of 2e, the soybean filler just tends to overshadow it.

That's just it, to me: 2e to me has very cool worlds, cool worlds that can be used with any other edition of the game without having to deal with the lame, tasteless hogwash that is the 2nd ed rules.

I'll prefer OD&D, AD&D, B/X, Rules Cyclopedia, and 3rd edition rules to AD&D2, each for different reasons.

We still play Spelljammer in 2e.

No problems on that front.  If you're willing to play with the rules, it's not that bad and can be a bit of fun.

If you're too caught up in how highbrow you are and how many awesome rules you know from other games, I can see how your enjoyment can be diminished.

As I write this, I'm buying the War Captain's Companion on Ebay.  Bitchin'.

Of all D&D the 2e PHB and DMG are the prettiest to this beholder. I even like those stylized blue panels everyone seems to hate.

Quote from: Blackhand;453575If you're too caught up in how highbrow you are and how many awesome rules you know from other games, I can see how your enjoyment can be diminished.

Frankly for much of the 2e era I played with hodgepodge of 1e, 2e, and Basic rules depending on what seemed to work at the moment. I do not think this was a rare situation.

I'm running a great 2e ravenloft campaign right now. I actually think it is a pretty good system. Haven't played it in years either. Revisiting it after all these years has been exciting. I also took the opportunity to re-read the Gygax 1E PHB and DMG to get a sense of the difference between the editions. Right now I'd be happy to play in any 1E, 2E, or 3E game. IMO they all have things they do well.

Quote from: Blackhand;453575No problems on that front.  If you're willing to play with the rules, it's not that bad and can be a bit of fun.

I actually agree with that. It's not that bad.

Quote from: Cole;453577Frankly for much of the 2e era I played with hodgepodge of 1e, 2e, and Basic rules depending on what seemed to work at the moment. I do not think this was a rare situation.

When the 2E PHB book first came out, this happened in my group for a while. One of the guys was still using his 1st edition book to make characters and 2E was new enough it took us a while to figure out what he was doing.

I never had any problems with 2e.  Honestly, the core books pretty much reflected how AD&D was actually played back then before people started revising their past play history to show they were "old school" or whatever all along.

The expansion books were a mixed bag, but I got plenty of mileage out of the Tome of Magic, the Player's Option books (though I never let my players get their hands on them; they should have been called DM's Option), and a fair chunk of the stuff from the Complete books (Fighter and Thief especially).

Yeah, yeah, no demons/devils/assassins/psionics/whatever-your-personal-sign-of-the-apocalypse-happens-to-be.

My favorite conversation regarding 2e took place soon after the DMG was published.  I was at my friend EJ's house and we were talking about our campaign.  EJ's sister's boyfriend played and saw us with our 2e books.  "Oh man, the new edition sucks," he said, "they took out everything cool from the original books, like the siege rules...they suck now."

"True," I said, "I guess I already have the first edition books so I'm lucky, but I've never really had to use the siege rules.  Did you use them often?"

"Well...we never used them, but still...."

I'm pretty sure that this has been hashed out at least twice before in long threads. I, and many others, thought the core phb was good, dmg indifferent, later books had many great ideas presented unevenly. I think most people agree that the tone changes and edits to things like demons were bad miscalculations - the main differences seem to be how much weight this carries, whether is totally sinks 2e or were minor flaws that could be overlooked for cleaned up mechanics.
 
At this point, I may never play 1e or 2e again. If I want old school, I'm more likely to go to a modern incarnation of Basic.
 
When I think back on it. the game design aspects of many of the supplements were terribly unprofessional.  They'd throw out new rules without seeing how they could be manipulated to create broken characters and without thought to how those rules interacted with the rest of the rules.  That describes many of the Dragon articles during 1e and 2e as well.  Good ideas but not enough numbers people.

Quote from: KenHR;453582The expansion books were a mixed bag, but I got plenty of mileage out of the Tome of Magic, the Player's Option books (though I never let my players get their hands on them; they should have been called DM's Option), and a fair chunk of the stuff from the Complete books (Fighter and Thief especially).

Yeah, hindsight being 20/20, it is very easy now to avoid some of the pitfalls of 2e.  I hear talk of how the second half 2e's lifecycle was marred by poorly designed books, but I haven't read a single one of those, so it doesn't really matter to me.  I particularly disliked my actual-play experience with the Player's Option books with one group, but I still enjoyed playing even though I was the only one using just the core rulebooks.

Quote from: islan;453588Yeah, hindsight being 20/20, it is very easy now to avoid some of the pitfalls of 2e.  I hear talk of how the second half 2e's lifecycle was marred by poorly designed books, but I haven't read a single one of those, so it doesn't really matter to me.  I particularly disliked my actual-play experience with the Player's Option books with one group, but I still enjoyed playing even though I was the only one using just the core rulebooks.

I think there was a serious dip in quality somewhere in the mid 90s. I remember a lot of the Class Books, Modules, Historical Supps, etc being pretty good. Mostly I ran Ravenloft and I remember (I think around 96 or so) the books started looking cheaper, the art got much worse, and the writing declined as well. But before that, I was very satisfied with the material I purchased.

Quote from: KenHR;453582I never had any problems with 2e.  Honestly, the core books pretty much reflected how AD&D was actually played back then before people started revising their past play history to show they were "old school" or whatever all along.

I don't immediately understand what you mean in how the 2e core books reflected actual 1e play. In particular many of the largest changes were specifics of the classes that strike me as top-down innovations. For example 1e style bards may have been a rare animal but is there reason to believe that something similar to the 2e bard was a common house rule? In my opinion the changes more often probably reflect an attempt to make the game cleave more closely to the flavor of fantasy novel series popular in the mid-80s.

Also, TSR's own novel series. Why do 2e rangers fight with two weapons? Icewind Dale. Why do 2e gnomes get a penalty to wisdom? Dragonlance.

If they reflected actual play, I would have instead expected something closer to a compromised between AD&D and basic, or (though I think it would have been a poor design move to do so) a reflection of the "realism-enhancing" house rules common at home tables or in Dragon.

Quote from: KenHR;453582The expansion books were a mixed bag, but I got plenty of mileage out of the Tome of Magic, the Player's Option books (though I never let my players get their hands on them; they should have been called DM's Option), and a fair chunk of the stuff from the Complete books (Fighter and Thief especially).

Tome of Magic was a particular favorite of mine, saw a lot of use in the groups I played with too.

Quote from: KenHR;453582Yeah, yeah, no demons/devils/assassins/psionics/whatever-your-personal-sign-of-the-apocalypse-happens-to-be.

That is stuff I tended to retain from 1e into ostensible 2e games. One of the longest-running PCs in my group was a character who was multiclassed between 2e-style specialty priest and 1e assassin.

Quote from: KenHR;453582My favorite conversation regarding 2e took place soon after the DMG was published.  I was at my friend EJ's house and we were talking about our campaign.  EJ's sister's boyfriend played and saw us with our 2e books.  "Oh man, the new edition sucks," he said, "they took out everything cool from the original books, like the siege rules...they suck now."

"True," I said, "I guess I already have the first edition books so I'm lucky, but I've never really had to use the siege rules.  Did you use them often?"

"Well...we never used them, but still...."

We usually used Mentzer's Warmachine

Quote from: Cole;453590I don't immediately understand what you mean in how the 2e core books reflected actual 1e play. In particular many of the largest changes were specifics of the classes that strike me as top-down innovations. For example 1e style bards may have been a rare animal but is there reason to believe that something similar to the 2e bard was a common house rule? In my opinion the changes more often probably reflect an attempt to make the game cleave more closely to the flavor of fantasy novel series popular in the mid-80s.

Also, TSR's own novel series. Why do 2e rangers fight with two weapons? Icewind Dale. Why do 2e gnomes get a penalty to wisdom? Dragonlance.

If they reflected actual play, I would have instead expected something closer to a compromised between AD&D and basic, or (though I think it would have been a poor design move to do so) a reflection of the "realism-enhancing" house rules common at home tables or in Dragon.

My reply was probably a bit hasty.  Most of what 2e did was streamline the game to reflect actual play, but yes, there were definite changes to how many of the classes worked (I personally liked specialist mages, but disliked the loss of flavor to the illusionist, and the druid's spell list was never corrected until PO: Spells & Magic).

There were definitely changes to many classes, but on the whole, the core books simplified the system to reflect how people actually played.