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

[overgeeked]

Apologies if this list was already posted.

What are the major differences between AD&D 1st Edition & AD&D 2nd Edition

Supposedly on May 21st WoTC are going to release a premium limited edition reprinting of Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition in of honor of the late Gary Gygax. I already own the AD&D 1st edition

rpg.stackexchange.com

 

[Orius]

I don't know, both 2e and 3e are serious contenders for the Worst Bloat category.

2e has a longer lifespan, 11 years vs. 8 years for 3e, and 3e spends some of its time updating material to 3.5. 2e also has about 10 different settings -- that number can get bigger if you want to count subsettings separately -- 31 splats, 15 binder punched MCs 10 softback MCs, 3 optional hardcovers, 4 Player's Option books, a handful of various supplements here and there and Battlesystem.

3e has beyond the core books has 44 hardcover books in 3.5 alone not counting the books from 3.0. The 3.5 hardcovers have at least 160 pages each and some go up quite a bit further than that. By comparison, the 2e splats are usually 128 pages except for the 96 page HR books. There's a fair amount of overlap with 3.0 material converted to 3.5 though. That's not counting the releases for the Realms or Eberron. Now a good deal of material in 2e tends to be fluff as well. At the very least if 3e doesn't have the most crunch, it has a noticeable higher crunch density.

 

[teitan]

1e was very much it’s own thing. It was D&D and Sword & sorcery fantasy, gritty adventure. Yes it was dungeon crawl. Ravenloft and Dragonlance revolutionized the game by beginning a shift to story driven campaigns though and the industry had been shifting that was as well and 2e was positioned as a generic fantasy toolkit and it was mediocre at that job. As a D&D game it was great if you tossed out NWP (lacked cohesion with the established thief skills) and kits (most of which were just slight adjustments and flavor hacks at best, bladesingers at worse). The system was streamlined, simplified (THAC0 was better than Attack Matrices) and did all this while remaining compatible with 1e and Basic because it was additions or reinterpretations as opposed to “changes” like going to 3e or later editions and without complications.

With all this though it took some of the charm away from the game itself. The rough edges of AD&D 1e were a huge part of its appeal. The exploration aspect of the game was a huge part of its appeal and as we saw in 2e, while the settings were amazing, the system itself was not fit for a story game style system like WEGd6 or Storyteller, Shadowrun or even BRP. 3e leaned back into what made D&D special and really captured a lot of the 1e flavor while being new, a resource management game and 5e captures what 2e was trying to do better while retaining what makes D&D cool as well.

2e is a great game. 1e is a great game. Neither is “better”. I like to think 1e is perfect if you throw the 2e thief in it. Forget the bard though. Blech.

 

[Mannahnin]

It wasn't many surveys and really wasn't massive either. They did what they could but they had no way to communicate reliably with their customer base. They had one survey in Dragon magazine, and they were reading other suggestions that people made - but this was before the internet existed. Everything was plain ol' USPS snail mail - both in letting players know they were looking for their ideas, and in players getting responses TO TSR. They did what they could but it wasn't exhaustive or scientific - and then they still did what they they wanted.

I suppose "massive" is inherently subjective. That 2nd ed questionnaire from Dragon 124 (Aug '87) was pretty extensive, and they solicited and received a ton of mailed feedback based on their Game Wizards columns, especially Zeb's infamous "Who Dies?" installment from Dragon 118, which deliberately poked the player base, talking about eliminations and reorganizations of character classes. Dragon had a pretty huge circulation in those days. Issue 121's column talks a bit about the feedback, as does 124's column by Michael Dobson:

Second Edition update
It's always been a little difficult to enter David Zeb Cook's office, what with rows of toy robots, walls covered with bizarre cartoons and drawings, heaps of Oriental reference works, German and Russian military histories (for Zeb's upcoming SPI® game project, the MOSCOW 1941tm game), and the other detritus that separates the office of a game designer from that of a normal human being.

Lately, the problem has been compounded by over 2,000 letters from you, our best fans and harshest critics, concerning every aspect of the Second Edition AD&D® game project. Boxes filled with letters are first read by Zeb (and, yes, he reads every word of every letter he gets), then the most interesting observations and comments are highlighted. Next, Steve Winter, our Senior Games Editor who's also working on Second Edition, reads every letter. Then I read them all. Selected letters are passed on to the rest of the Games Division staff and to company executives.

Some of the responses we've received are incredible. Three stand out: an 80-page dissertation on the AD&D game system by Bob Bell, a Tennessee player and DM, who did a first-rate job of analyzing problems and recommending innovative solutions; a 50-page analysis of magic-user spell problems by Scott Mayo, another long-time player (he's now working on clerical spells); and, the single biggest package we received: a letter from Jim Trew full of creative rules variants and some very interesting questions that we'll need to address. We appreciate the shorter letters, too, so don't rush out to send us a few hundred pages of comments. We are sincerely appreciative of the time, effort, and quality that all of our correspondents have shown.

Incidentally, to provide your letter with the maximum impact, it's a good idea to type it, organize your thoughts and comments, and keep it concise. Zeb, Steve, Jon Pickens (Research and Play-Test Coordinator), and I regret that we can't personally answer each letter, but if we did, Second Edition would never get done. By the way, death threats are not very effective.

As Zeb has noted in previous installments of this column, the letters have had a real impact. Things we were pretty sure about have changed because you, the true editors of the TSR line, have persuaded us that the changes are right. The bard, for example, lives because of your letters.
But we need even more input, and that's why Jon has put together a mammoth questionnaire to find out everything we can about what you want. The questionnaire is slated to appear in POLYHEDRON Newszine and this issue of DRAGON® Magazine, and we'll be bringing copies to
the GEN CON® 20 Game Fair and elsewhere.

Yeah, I've complained about that particular lack of understanding of their own game for decades (though it took me a decade to realize it myself prior to that - but then I wasn't designing a new edition to publish). They should have picked ONE single ability score rolling method intended to be used by everyone, and then adjusted the bonuses on the charts to fit the probabilities for that one method. But backward compatibility with 1E was a huge design focus they unnecessarily burdened themselves with, and it KILLED most really significant changes that should have been made.

Indeed.

 

[Blue]

Sorry, late to the thread and I haven't read the 100+ entries.

I remember a conversation with my DM not too long after we switched. He felt that 2ed was a lot more codified and unified, but that it lost a bit of it's soul in becoming so. As a player, I felt it was a lot more organized and straightforward, with reduced crazy subsystems.

*Raises glass to Mike, the DM whom I really learned to RP under. He passed a few years back.

 

[James Gasik]

Fewer, maybe, but there were still crazy subsystems in the supplementary products.

 

[haakon1]

backward compatibility

Backwards compatibility is a huge part of what makes an edition change good or bad, imho. I’m always hoping for a cleanup without tossing out the best of what came before, and I think that was best done by 3e, 3.5e, and 5e.

 

[haakon1]

I see statements like this quite a bit, but, being another person who started with 2nd edition, have never understood why 1st edition is so different. Is it something ephemeral? I am sincerely curious as to what makes it so different than 2nd edition.

Feel.
2e knuckled under to the anti-D&D crowd (no more devils, assassins, or half-orcs).
And its center of gravity was Forgotten Realms instead of Greyhawk (the game’s creator’s D&D campaign turned into a setting).
FR-centric went along with adventure modules switching from dungeon crawls to participating in someone else’s story.

To summarize, from a messy collaboration treating you as peers who should create your own stuff & coukd share their world to a processed product. Which had good & bad sides.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Backwards compatibility is a huge part of what makes an edition change good or bad, imho. I’m always hoping for a cleanup without tossing out the best of what came before, and I think that was best done by 3e, 3.5e, and 5e.

Quite so. I do remember being fairly disappointed with 2E, perhaps LESS for what it did change than what it didn't. I still went all-in on it for pretty much the duration of 2E though. Only started drifting away as TSR itself was dying/dead, but never felt any real pull to go back to it like I have with 1E and 3.5.

 

[haakon1]

Quite so. I do remember being fairly disappointed with 2E, perhaps LESS for what it did change than what it didn't. I still went all-in on it for pretty much the duration of 2E though. Only started drifting away as TSR itself was dying/dead, but never felt any real pull to go back to it like I have with 1E and 3.5.

I stopped playing D&D around 1989, and restarted DMing in 1996 with 1e, then 3e about a year after it was published, then 3.5e ever since it came out. I’ve played 2e, 4e, PF1, and 5e, but didn’t like them as much ... and PF1 & 5e seem fine, but I have played enough to run them.

For my 3.5e campaigns, I use materials from every edition & PF1 & SF, with the least from 4e, and perhaps the most from AD&D 1e & 3.5e.