I started playing with AD&D (Holmes really but that's another issue) but quickly switched to Stormbringer and Champions. When I finally got around to DMing a long running game, I used 2e. In fact, I thought 2e was so superior that I gave away many of the AD&D books because I thought no one would ever want to use them again.

But now, decades later, I don't even have a copy of 2e books. What I found, especially in the contexts of "old school" gaming is that AD&D is closer to the roots of fantasy than 2e. It formed a more grounded starting point. What I've seen over the years is that as D&D has changed it has gradually stopped trying to emulate classic fantasy and is just trying to emulate the fantasy of the previous editions. Not just in the art but in the rules and background.

Because of this, AD&D is a better starting point to add rules to, rather than try to get a more recent edition and add the fantasy flavor back in.

All that being said, I only play OD&D now because the hit dice system in that game is mechanically superior to any that have come since.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron on April 10, 2023, 04:31:50 AM
AD&D1e is more popular than 2e for the same reason Classic Traveller is still remembered fondly: it's incomplete, and that's a good thing.

Quotean incomplete system is better than a complete one. If a system is complete, then when read it evokes nothing in the mind - nothing more than is written. If a system is incomplete, then the reader fills in the gaps with their own imagination. For example, in AD&D1e the description of "fighter" makes no mention of home culture or era. Is this a saxon thane in the line against Viking invaders? The Viking invaders themselves? A lamellar-clad model for the terracotta warriors of Qin? French heavy infantry at Agincourt? A young squire daring to seek out and fight a werewolf? The girl fighting the jabberwocky? A bronze-clad warrior of Sparta? A daring Amazon of the Crimea, firing her bow from her horse at Greek invaders? An Iron Age warrior of Kush? A samurai? It doesn't say. You fill in the blanks! If it were more complete, you could not do this.

That, plus 2e brought in the splatbooks. Fuck that.

I think that's a false dichotomy. You can create a system that gives a fair amount of structure without also limiting your creativity. What I find useful is a system which is designed as a series of guidelines to speed up your own creation process. Sure, you could always make up your own stuff from scratch, but having the framework already in place is a nice time saver.

I had the opposite problem. There's this very simple toolkit that I think is more or less perfect for what I want to do, but I'm paralyzed by the amount of choice and, since there's nobody else interested in playing, I can't really muster the effort to do much with it. I wrote a handful of blog posts converting stuff from other games to it to showcase the flexibility, but that's it.

I started with Moldvay/Cook B/X and quickly moved into AD&D, though we kept playing BECMI as well.  I still have all my AD&D hardcovers; I even have extras of a couple that were so used they fell apart.  By the time 2e dropped, I was in college and it was interesting that the slightly older players there preferred 1e, but the younger guys were playing 2e because it was the new thing in stores and there was no Internet yet I guess.

But I never liked 2e much for a variety of reasons.  It was definitely more bland in tone.  They removed my favorite villains, devils & demons, later replacing them as tanarr'i and baatezu.  For that reason alone, 2e is worth skipping.  Then they did weird things like the hole-punched monster books and Monstrous Compendium supplements that were supposed to go in binders.  They added "kits" for character classes, which I hate.  Splat books and setting books got out of control.  They replaced my beloved Greyhawk as the "official" world with the utterly forgettable Forgotten Realms, which included (gasp) good drow. 

They produced Planescape, which might be my least favorite take on the D&D multiverse ever created.  From the lame writing to the awful DiTerlizzi art, I despise that stuff with every fiber of my being.  Indeed, 2e effectively drove me away from D&D (we mostly played MERP in the 90s) and I never went back to official versions of the game, though I got into the OSR scene starting in 2016.  To me, it set D&D down the path of churning out bland, commercialized fantasy gaming content for the masses and veered away from the niche wonder of the game's first decade.

I've got a number of specific issues with 2e.  Elf supremacy, elves are just too damn good even before the Complete Book of Elves came along.  Custom,composite longbows with sheaf arrows.  Longbows were already the best weapon in the game, they didn't need or deserve a damage boost and the ability to add in the Strength damage bonus.  Specialist magic-users get an extra spell at first level and generalists don't.  Magic-users in general needed a boost but the specialist bonus spell thing is just unfair. One thing Castles and Crusades got right is that magic-users should get bonus spells just like Clerics do.  Nonweapon proficiencies should have been on the same scale as thieves skills (they did this in XXVc.) as is most adventurers are better at things like smithing or baking than they are at their adventuring speciality.  I like the 2e proficiency system okay and The Complete Book of Fighters makes it better.

There are some things that probably should have been done in 2e like ditiching level limits.  I'm not clear enough on weapon speed and initiative in 2e but I think it should have been more like 1e, giving an extra attack if your weapon speed was twice your foe's instead of just adding to initiative.  Don't get me wrong,1e initiative is a mess but I like things like spears and polearms automatically attacking first when charged.  2e didn't think through the weapon verses armour table's effect on the game when they replaced it with a damage type verses armour table.  In the end they just continued the situation where a long sword and long bow were the ultimate weapons and everything else was trash.  I'd have to dig into the fighter who specializes in darts a little bit.  It's a problem in both editions if I remember right but the long bow's range and the custom bow rule make it less of a thing in 2e.

I did like the 2e version of weapon specialization.  It throws the fighter a bone without giving them the outrageous double specialization from Unearthed Arcana.  The 2e Bard and Barbarian were better implemented than 1e though IRRC the Barbarian wasn't in the PHB.

Quote from: hedgehobbit on April 10, 2023, 09:06:38 AM
What I've seen over the years is that as D&D has changed it has gradually stopped trying to emulate classic fantasy and is just trying to emulate the fantasy of the previous editions. Not just in the art but in the rules and background.

Bingo. I've been saying for a long while now that D&D is its own subgenre of fantasy, and doesn't really do anything else well. Personally, I think this starts all that way back with OD&D, but it's only become more the case in every successive edition, and solidified in a big way during 2nd and 3rd edition. I'd largely blame that on the proliferation of D&D novels between the late 80s and early 00s, starting with Dragonlance, but moreso with the Drizzt and Elminster novels. It think those really locked in what the D&D world was like in the public conscious.

Thanks for all the answers!

I have been bugged by this question since I learned about all the people returning to older editions of D&D and I couldn't understand why 1st edition got so much more love than 2nd edition of Advanced D&D. As I said, I missed the whole run of AD&D 1st Ed. and, thus, I didn't have a reference to comprehend the reason.

It looks one reason doesn't take over as the main one. And I guess that is the case for most people who choose not to move to a new edition of any RPG.

In my corner of the world (and of the internet), when 3rd Ed. came out, I don't remember many people who were playing AD&D 2nd Ed. rejecting Third Edition and staying behind. My anecdotal evidence, based off of my memory of the turn of the millennium, is that no tears were shed for 2nd Ed. and people moved to the 3rd with confidence. So, if nobody (or very few people) cared enough about 2nd Ed. back in the day, why would they return to it 20 years later?

Quote from: Kyle Aaron on April 10, 2023, 04:31:50 AM
AD&D1e is more popular than 2e for the same reason Classic Traveller is still remembered fondly: it's incomplete, and that's a good thing.

That is a very interesting point. And it made me wonder if my own favorite little games are my favorites because they are all incomplete, having been cancelled before their authors could iron them out due to poor sales. I see what they could be with own work and not what they are.

Quote from: hedgehobbit on April 10, 2023, 09:06:38 AM
What I've seen over the years is that as D&D has changed it has gradually stopped trying to emulate classic fantasy and is just trying to emulate the fantasy of the previous editions.

It seems to me you described 5th edition. But that was bond to happen when D&D accumulated a vast mythos with all the settings from AD&D and forward. But is it necessarily a bad thing? It is certainly not conductive to play any kind of fantasy other than the D&D-kind of fantasy, but there's some good bits inside D&D fantasy, even if some people may be tired of it after playing it for 30 years.

Quote from: zer0th on April 10, 2023, 09:42:22 AMIt seems to me you described 5th edition. But that was bound to happen when D&D accumulated a vast mythos with all the settings from AD&D and forward. But is it necessarily a bad thing? It is certainly not conductive to play any kind of fantasy other than the D&D-kind of fantasy, but there's some good bits inside D&D fantasy, even if some people may be tired of it after playing it for 30 years.

What that does is create a divide among players. Players who use the official settings are well served but those trying to create their own setting have to undo lots of D&Disms to make it work.

So the question becomes, how many people come to D&D because of the game versus how many because they like Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance?

While I personally prefer the presentation/feel of 1e and *reading* Gygax's 1e, it's far easier to teach players from the 2e books. I also favor the modular fashion many of the rules are presented in, which to be fair are generally 1e house rules or Dragon rules added and clarified. Seriously, just try to teach someone how to run a combat from the 1e initiative explanation. 

Usually I just end up running 2e, with weapon speed/casting times and a couple of tweaks to crits and gold = XP. Ultimately they're nearly identical in terms of actual functionality, so the wars of 1e/2e are pointless.

I have only played AD&D 1st edition.  Never tried 2nd edition so that is my reason (lazy as it is) for liking 1st edition.

Quote from: zer0th on April 09, 2023, 10:53:15 PM
So, pushed by another thread talking about AD&D 1st edition and not wanting to hijack that thread, I would like to ask: Why people prefer 1st edition over 2nd edition when it comes to AD&D?

My obviously subjective answer:

1e has better D&D rules. 1e has more colorful and rich prose that I enjoy. (2e is *clearer* in its presentation of rules, but as I mentioned, where the rules differ I almost always prefer the 1e version). 2e took some good concepts and produced rules for them, but the implementation was often poor and unimaginative and...boring. Specialist wizards are a good example. Great concept, but a dry, cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all boring implementation. The 1e illusionist subclass is a far better example of how such a concept should be handled. 1e has great, classic adventures that all the other editions constantly re-hash in lesser forms. (One exception is 2e's Return to the Tomb of Horrors. That's a great adventure, and incorporates the unchanged original adventure into a larger whole.)

Also, when 2e came out I switched over to it. I remember sitting at my dining room table, going through the new 2e rulebooks and desperately trying to like them with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I mean, just look at the 1e Dungeon Masters Guide compared to the 2e DMG. But I soldiered on. Then I started buying adventures and other supplements. Every time I was like, "this looks potentially cool," and every time I was disappointed. Eventually I realized that TSR was taking the game in a direction that I didn't want to follow. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize it. Like I said, I *wanted* to like it and I tried to make it work for me...but it just didn't. So that experience colors my perception of 2e.

FWIW, my preference for 1e isn't because of nostalgia or because I started with 1e. I started with original D&D (in the form the the Holmes Basic set). And I've played all the TSR editions, and a lot of 3.0. When 3.5 came out I evaluated what I wanted to do. I didn't want to keep going around the edition carousel with 3.5. Looked at various systems: C&C, True20, Pathfinder, Savage Words, etc. It was at this point that I decided to just run my favorite D&D rules. So I started running original D&D and 1e AD&D, and that's where I've stayed every since. I took a brief look at 4e and decided it wasn't for me. Same for 5e: took a brief look and saw nothing that made me want to switch. I'm completely uninterested in 6e or whatever label they'll put on the next one.

Quote from: zer0th on April 10, 2023, 09:42:22 AM

Quote from: hedgehobbit on April 10, 2023, 09:06:38 AM
What I've seen over the years is that as D&D has changed it has gradually stopped trying to emulate classic fantasy and is just trying to emulate the fantasy of the previous editions.

It seems to me you described 5th edition. But that was bond to happen when D&D accumulated a vast mythos with all the settings from AD&D and forward. But is it necessarily a bad thing? It is certainly not conductive to play any kind of fantasy other than the D&D-kind of fantasy, but there's some good bits inside D&D fantasy, even if some people may be tired of it after playing it for 30 years.

Not only is it not just 5th edition, it isn't even just D&D. FantasyCraft, Fantasy AGE, Pathfinder, The Dark Eye, Warhammer -- hell, even properties that originate from outside the tabletop gaming world like Dragon Age, Goblin Slayer, or the Elder Scrolls... I'd call all of them "D&D Fantasy". However, I do agree that there's a charm to "D&D Fantasy" which OSR folks sometimes forget about. A lot of the tropes of the genre (colorful races, professional adventurers, dungeons, readily available spells, potions and magic items), they're all things that exist because they're useful for making fun roleplaying games. As maligned as the "kitchen sink" approach to fantasy is, it makes DM-ing a lot easier since you can pretty much chuck in anything you can think of.

Honestly, I think that for a light-hearted, beer-and-pretzels type of game, "D&D Fantasy" is probably pretty close to the optimal genre, and the proof for that is in just how prolific it is. I just don't buy the assertion that D&D hasn't always been that kind of game. Different editions tune up or down just how common magic-items are, or how deadly the game is, but the implied setting assumptions of every edition of D&D are basically the same. 

I think it's because 1E is easier to run for DMS  than later editions. Though man Gygax onetruwayism and contradictions have not aged well.

You can't play an Assassin because killing other brings for money is evil. Yet taking money to clear out the evil orcs is fine.

Elves have an ability to find secret doors as an racial ability except not really if you follow the rules on Page 20 of the DMG ( not sure of the exact page) where he goes on an unwanted semi-rant on how even Elves have actively search for them despite what is written in the PHB.

The Monk oh my fucking God what was he thinking. If you ever asked yourself why no one played or still don't play them read up on the class. No bonus to high Dex to AC, 2D4 hp, starting AC of 10. I can just imagine his thought processes. " people are going to want to play Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris, I could allow them to do that ....naahhh". The class is only redeemed by a Dragon magazine article 57 or 75 not sure.

The line of bulshit about poison. If as a developer you hate the use of poison why include it in the rules. By the book if you're actively seen using poison there is a base percentage chance of being attacked by those around you who see it. So if one arm Charlie and Kevin the kid street urchin see you using it they will drop everything they are doing and attack you.


Just the micromanaging control freak asshole vibe from the rules. So much info that should have been in the PHB is in the DMG because of Gygax reasons and feels.

I enjoy 1E and am currently a player in a game and may run one yet too many look back on 1E with Rose coloured glasses they spray painted completely back.

Quote from: Abraxus on April 10, 2023, 10:48:14 AM
I think it's because 1E is easier to run for DMS  than later editions. Though man Gygax onetruwayism and contradictions have not aged well.

You can't play an Assassin because killing other brings for money is evil. Yet taking money to clear out the evil orcs is fine.

Elves have an ability to find secret doors as an racial ability except not really if you follow the rules on Page 20 of the DMG ( not sure of the exact page) where he goes on an unwanted semi-rant on how even Elves have actively search for them despite what is written in the PHB.

The Monk oh my fucking God what was he thinking. If you ever asked yourself why no one played or still don't play them read up on the class. No bonus to high Dex to AC, 2D4 hp, starting AC of 10. I can just imagine his thought processes. " people are going to want to play Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris, I could allow them to do that ....naahhh". The class is only redeemed by a Dragon magazine article 57 or 75 not sure.

Just the micromanaging control freak asshole vibe from the rules. So much info that should have been in the PHB is in the DMG because of Gygax reasons and feels.

I enjoy 1E and am currently a player in a game and may run one yet too many look back on 1E with Rose coloured glasses they spray painted completely back.

Gygax never liked psionics or monks, they didn't fit the setting.  There wasn't an incentive to make monks viable.  I personally hate Monks in a D&D setting and don't use them as NPC's or groups.  If a player wants to play one, thats ok, but I'm doing nothing for the monk from a story perspective.

I don't care if he liked them or not. It's absolutely no excuse or counter argument for terrible game design. And no because it's Gygax he does not get a free pass for it in my book. Absolutely non-negotiable or up for any form of debate. I'm tired of that excuse of " well Gary hated it it ". It's no oneexcuse or counter argument no matter how many times the grognards bring it up.

Either don't include such rules, classes etc or make a better job designing them instead of that shitty excuse of a class in the PHB. Running it by raw is essentially having the play commit suicide. No one plays ten because either they want a real challenge even if they have terrible time doing so. Or the did not read the class completely and did not recognize their mistake

AD&D1e is just better, at least before unearthed arcana.