The difference between Ad&d 1st and 2nd edition?

[Sir Robilar]

Hi there,

I guess the thread title explains everything. I´m just curious as I began playing with AD&D 2nd edition but never knew how it differs from 1st edition AD&D. Also, would you say that 2nd edition improved the game?

 

[Wik]

The difference is pretty big. One is the greatest edition of D&D ever. The other was a complete waste, and destroyed D&D entirely.

...or something.

 

[Wik]

To be serious, though - 1e was a bit more "rulesy" at times, and had a bit of a dungeon-crawl focus. It was also very much a swords and sorcery game in orientation, and had a heavy chunk of weird, gonzo "D&Disms".

2e, on the other hand, seemed to focus more on "role-playing" in focus, essentially saying "to hell with mechanics, anyone that worries too much about mechanics is a min/maxer" and really pushed the character side of the game. It was also more influenced by real-world history in how it was presented, and was more high fantasy than sword and sorcery.

Rules-wise, 1e had the assassin and monk classes, rangers could cast wizard spells at 10th level, and the level limits on non-human races (there was a half-orc!) were lower. Bard was really more of a "prestige class" (you had to build into it). 2e, on the other hand, had character kits (which were hit or miss), proficiencies (skills) built into the core rules, and introduced specialist wizards and the bard core class.

 

[Chainsaw]

Go to dragonsfoot.org and ask as well... That board focuses on 1E/2E.

 

[Aus_Snow]

They're closer than one might think. . . within spitting distance, I'd say.

 

[Steel_Wind]

Oh - totally more akin to one another than 3rd or 4th are compared to 1/2 or to each other.

You could run a 2E module in 1st edition with virtually no changes and it would play just fine (and vice versa). The kits and powers Splat Books did change things - but they were never core and were rarely reflected in the settings material.

The thing I remember most about 2E was not the rules - it was the settings. A vast, glorious, cornucopia of settings with their own peculiar rules and sub-genre of flavor.

Add a new player acquisition model that just BROKE in to a BILLION PIECES due to that little game called Magic:TG and all it took was a little ... push. And off the cliff the whole thing went.

Enter Ryan Dancey and Peter Adkinson and then before you can say Heroscape - here we are.

 

[awesomeocalypse]

1st edition gave you lots of awesome rules for playing a cool fantasy hero who raided unspeakably deadly dungeons for a chance at treasure and glory.

2nd edition did that too, but then it told you that actually using those rules made you a bad roleplayer, and the game was ideally played without ever rolling (and lots of monty python jokes).

 

[Henry]

2nd edition toned down some of the more egregious parts of 1st edition introduced by Unearthed Arcana -- double weapon specialization, the cavalier and barbarian classes, and some of the more unused parts of AD&D1 -- such as (replacing) the nigh-unused psionics rules with something that worked a little better (but had its own problems), ditching the "weapon vs. ac" and grapple/pummel/wrestle rules, etc.

It had some neat parts (wizard specialization classes), and some not-so-neat parts (introducing two-weapon fighting, clerical spells, and the toned-down favored enemy bonus for the ranger was a personal dislike of mine). Quite a few gamers, such as myself and our groups, mixed parts of the two. Our own groups, for instance, used non-weapon proficiencies from 2E, but we kept the 1st edition ranger almost whole-cloth (and used the tracking rules from 2E NWPs). Man, that Ranger giant-class bonus was freakin' awesome -- getting +1 per level damage PER HIT against anything from goblins to storm giants was the hallmark of the old ranger class.

We used wizard schools, but kept the 1E artifact and relic rules, because they screamed flavor -- to be honest, there has not been a single version of artifacts that captured my imagination like the 1E artifacts -- 4E artifacts come close, but still the 1E artifacts take the cake. I highly recommend finding an acquaintance with a copy of the old 1E DMG and cajoling them into letting you borrow it -- it is like reading an 18th century explorer's travelogue cataloging a foreign land.

 

[pawsplay]

Hi there,

I guess the thread title explains everything. I´m just curious as I began playing with AD&D 2nd edition but never knew how it differs from 1st edition AD&D.

Rules-wise, not much difference. However, they had substantually different assumptions about the standard way to run a game, different character options, and certainly different organization. 1e was basically a folio of Gary's notes, anything he wrote rules on. 2e was written in a more instructional form, and then had tons of new rules scattered among various supplements. Even Oriental Adventures and Unearthed Arcana, which certainly had their problems, were relatively self-contained in terms of 1e rules.

Also, would you say that 2nd edition improved the game?

On the balance, yes. However, it did a bunch of things not as well, including some stuff that was actually kind of important. And I can never really forgive it for turning the original prestige class into a wimpy rogue-wizard with a guitar. The beguiler concept is okay, but it works better as a dedicated caster than as a sideline to a skill-based hybrid character whose spells compete with his own class abilities. Definitely not impressed with the loss of the assassin and the half-orc, the genericization of the greater demons and devils (most egregiously, Tiamat and Lolth turning into deities and Marilith becoming an entire species of demons). Mixed feelings on the dragon power upgrade; on the one hand, yes, that gives dragons real street cred, on the other hand, it kind of moved away from a game were 6th-12th level or so was the sweet spot for traditional swords-and-sorcery adventuring. In 2e, there was this kind of idea that a 21st level fighter might still be slaying dragons, whereas in 1e, higher level characters were trying to figure out how to survive on the outer planes, assasinating archdevils, founding empires, and dealing with millenial demiliches and nests of dracolisks.

 

[Ariosto]

There are many differences in detail, which can be pretty significant or pretty negligible. For instance, there is the business with Priests and Spheres. We had (chiefly as the DM's fault) a player who did not understand, and kept playing his Cleric as if he had access to (and preference for) the Druid's spells in addition to what he ought to have had.

So, we had him turn instead to the 1st ed. PHB, with its separate Cleric and Druid lists.

Since most of the players have that handbook (only the DM having 2nd. ed. books), it ended up becoming standard.

Then, the DM wanted to look up prices for some magic items, and borrowed the 1st ed. DMG. That book is chock full of weird and wonderful stuff! When people stumbling over THAC0 was holding up the game, we turned to the tables of pre-calculated "to hit" numbers.

Those tables, by the way, have six repeating 20s before going to 21. Without that in 2nd, does a "natural" 20 always hit?

That's one of the more minor details. An AC works basically the same way! So do hit dice, levels, saving throws, movement rates, experience points and classes (although assassins and monks might be mysterious if you have only a 2nd ed. PHB, and bards are quite different). Psionics are very different in AD&D 2. The real basics are pretty much the same among Original, AD&D 1, the several Basics, and AD&D 2.

As I recall, the biggest difference between AD&D 2 and all the rest is that XP for treasure, although mentioned as an "option", is not the standard. That, and the level limits on non-humans are higher (whereas humans are limited to 20th).

Initiative and surprise use different dice and methods (both d6 in AD&D 1), and I think so do some other things. Weapon vs. armor is different. Druids and rangers are different. Rangers get 2d8 HD at 1st, 1d8 at later levels, and get druid and magic-user spells, in AD&D 1. Druids advance more (perhaps sometimes slightly too) rapidly in 1st edition. The AD&D 2 Rogue has basically the same features as the AD&D 1 Thief, but the numbers are different.

In 1st ed., "Wizard" is the title of a magic-user of level 11+. Each class has its own peculiar titles by level, so a party might be made up of a Champion, a Chevalier, a Pathfinder, a Lama, and a Warlock.

In 1st ed., elven fighter/thieves can cast spells in all sorts of armor.

Boy, I dunno. Seems one is likely to find something every few pages!