Quote from: StormBringer;276370Mr Poliquin!  We meet again!  

I disagree on a couple of points.  Ranger as arcane was a bit of a miss, but the spell spheres were one of the best improvements to come out of 2e.  

Heya,

Oh yeah, druids who didn't have access to the commune with nature spell. Wheee! That was super well thought-out. The priest spell spheres: great idea, horrendous execution.

I agree with enjoying redone games for what they are. After all a tasty hamburger with 20% of it stepped on is still a tasty hamburger! You can still save some of it even if the stamping percentage increases over the years. But still... I personally would rather take it directly from the chef and not all the clumsy new waiters wearing chef hats...

Well, in the early to mid 1990s, Dungeon Magazine was not half bad. Not up to the level of some 1e greats, but adventures like Asflag's Unintentional Emporium or Deadly Treasure played very well at our table. Also liked the first Ruins of Undermountain set -- very good maps there. The original Dark Sun set had its merits as well. And the system works fine, even if many changes (like the elimination of the separate illusionist class) proved to be dubious. Over years of playing, we used an entire two house rules (one concerning ability generation, which was for some reason "assign 70/80 points between the six scores", and another with critical hits - "if you roll a 20, you gain an extra attack").

But it never had that something that 1e had with assassins and half-orcs and anti-paladins. We played 2e because that was available, but we treasured the bits of 1e we could get our hands on. Like The Temple of Elemental Evil, and that wasn't even close to EGG's best.

Quote from: The_Shadow;276180Hate of 2e is a mainly online phenomenon. Plenty of people still happily play it. After all, it was a nicely cleaned-up version of AD&D which did its job well until the splats of the latter part of its history made the going tougher.

It seems like that happens with many game systems.

Corebook gets written, and is an entirely playable game all by itself. Then they add some worldbooks, and each one adds "just a few optional rules." And more and more of those get written, with the authours of one not being entirely familiar with or making an effort to have their stuff compatible with those other "just a few optional rules."

After a bit it becomes a huge tangled spaghetti mess of rules, and they start saying, "well, obviously we need a new edition to streamline it all!"

So the question really is "which 2e?" The corebooks? The corebooks plus first four splatbooks? The corebooks plus everything ever written? I think there's no question that at some point it becomes a mess. So really the issue is not whether there's anything "redeemable" about AD&D2e as a whole, but rather where a GM ought to draw the line with all the books they allow.

Which goes for D&D3.5, GURPS3e/4e, (n)WoD, probably D&D4e in a year or two, and many other systems, too.

Experience for story goals was a pretty neat idea. I didn't see it used outside of Four from Cormyr and Infinity Engine D&D games however. By not using it more for thier own adventure modules, I feel that they dropped the ball when it came to developing the whole epic fantasy storytelling angle they were going for.

I also feel that they failed to look at what had gone on before (like beat charts) and incorporating such ideas into the D&D paradigm (placing said beats on the campaign maps).

A lot of wasted opportunities, really.

Quote from: jgants;276486I completely agree, and had pretty much the same experience (although we sort of tried to play 1e once or twice, it was mostly just BD&D with the spells, monsters, classes, and races from AD&D added in).

I think that was probably quite common.  My friends and I started with BD&D and just added in the "advanced" stuff that we liked when we played AD&D. We did the same with optional rules from Dragon magazine, so that some games would have the Perception attribute, or Partial Armour and hit-locations, or the Pain mechanic.  We'd use those for a while and if we liked them, we'd keep using them, and if we didn't we'd drop them.

(There was an old article in Dragon for making custom character classes for BD&D - I should see if I can dig that out...)

One of the goals for 3e was making the game more uniform - the designers recognized that all the different people "playing D&D" weren't using the same  set of rules.

I think 2e was a good game, since it was the *same* game as BD&D / AD&D - just a different version of the rules.  We used 2e material in our BD&D/AD&D game all the time.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;276814So the question really is "which 2e?" The corebooks? The corebooks plus first four splatbooks? The corebooks plus everything ever written? I think there's no question that at some point it becomes a mess. So really the issue is not whether there's anything "redeemable" about AD&D2e as a whole, but rather where a GM ought to draw the line with all the books they allow.

IMHO, when talking about a game I just assume it's the core rules we're talking about. You know, the mandatory stuff that everyone who plays the game uses and that makes up the only reasonable common ground to talk about.

Maybe this is my old-school roots showing, but it wasn't until I started reading online forums that I came across people who have some sort of need to keep buying and buying rules expansions. I had always assumed most people just used the core books. And maybe most people do. Or rather did. Maybe it's just the hardcore must-buy-everything gamers who are left in the hobby today because that's the only model the publishers encourage. And maybe that's why people speak past one another so much in these systems discussions.

Still, it seems reasonable to me to presume that you're only talking about core rules, since that's the only thing everyone who has played a system has in common. You simply don't have shared experience about anything else.

Quote from: Haffrung;276941Maybe this is my old-school roots showing, but it wasn't until I started reading online forums that I came across people who have some sort of need to keep buying and buying rules expansions. I had always assumed most people just used the core books. And maybe most people do. Or rather did. Maybe it's just the hardcore must-buy-everything gamers who are left in the hobby today because that's the only model the publishers encourage. And maybe that's why people speak past one another so much in these systems discussions.

Me too. But I used to play 2e mostly between the ages of 11 and 15, when money was hard to come by for obvious reasons. How could I have afforded the splats? (Our gaming group of 6, circa 1993, had one DMG, one MM and no PHB between us - we just used a combination of Basic D&D, guesswork and deduction in creation characters. This was after we'd finished our 14 hour shifts down the mines, of course.)

It's an interesting point, though: are hardcore buy-everything types really the only ones left in the hobby? I don't buy everything, and actually haven't bought anything in...10 years maybe? I'm still in the hobby. Maybe it's just that buy-everything types are more visible because they're the ones who are most active on the internet?

I've mentioned before that there's a connection between comic collectors and RPG collectors.  The two industries are intertwined in many ways - something that wasn't the case back in the earlier days of RPGs.

Quote from: Stuart;276868(There was an old article in Dragon for making custom character classes for BD&D - I should see if I can dig that out...)

If you can, please let us know which issue it was in. Interested minds want to know...

I'll start another thread about this so as not to derail...

Quote from: jeff37923;277193If you can, please let us know which issue it was in. Interested minds want to know...

Issue 109, page 8.

Quote from: Haffrung;276941IMHO, when talking about a game I just assume it's the core rules we're talking about. You know, the mandatory stuff that everyone who plays the game uses and that makes up the only reasonable common ground to talk about.

That's a reasonable assumption, unfortunately it's wrong. When people talk about a particular edition of a game, what they mean is "all the books I've read and/or seen used in play, combined with the style of the GM and players in the groups I've seen it played."

So for example in one GURPS group I know of, the party spent two-and-a-half sessions fighting a dozen gargoyles - fortnightly sessions, so they were doing the same fight a month after they started it. But in my group, we had a battle to decide the fate of the entire Roman republic in half an hour. Now, ask the different players about their impressions of GURPS 4e...  

Quote from: HaffrungMaybe this is my old-school roots showing, but it wasn't until I started reading online forums that I came across people who have some sort of need to keep buying and buying rules expansions.

I don't think is really old school. It's just that unless you play D&D, in most cases only the GM has any books at all. Most players show up with snacks and dice and that's it. They might out of simple curiosity buy a book or two of some system not being played in the group, but that's about it.

But those players aren't the ones spending hours each week discussing rpgs online

Quote from: HaffrungStill, it seems reasonable to me to presume that you're only talking about core rules, since that's the only thing everyone who has played a system has in common. You simply don't have shared experience about anything else.

Again, that's a reasonable assumption but it's wrong.

Besides, if we stuck to describing our shared experiences and never talked about our individual experiences we'd never learn anything. Often you see that these discussions - for example, Pundit's question starting this thread - are about discovering whether our experiences are shared or individual.

I was mainly thinking of the core rules, but of course someone might want to argue that some supplement was particularly awesome, some have argued here that the 2e settings were awesome.

RPGPundit

I can't think of anything.