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General Tabletop Discussion
D&D Older Editions
What does AD&D 2E do better than 5E?
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9013041" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>I'm more of a 1e AD&D player than a 2e one, but both editions do better in compelling the players to interact with the environment. One thing I've noticed over the decades is that treasure is becoming increasingly less and less important as loot drops become increasingly less necessary for the promoted playstyle. By 3e, non-magical treasure doesn't really matter unless you are playing with fully fungible wealth that can be freely converted to magical treasure, which itself creates weird metas where groups felt like they couldn't afford to hide the treasure and therefore there was no reason to look for it (literal loot drops). By 4e and 5e, even the magical loot has become "meh". I'm still a big believer in the value of a compelling loot drop and adventures as treasure hunters for gameplay reasons, and AD&D does that better than subsequent editions.</p><p></p><p>Another thing that 2e tended to do better than modern editions is theater of the mind. While miniatures have long been supported and even strongly encouraged by AD&D, in the early years you never really needed them and people coming to AD&D from the Basic boxed set probably never even gave them much thought. I love me some battlemats these days, but one of the big advantages of theater of the mind is that if you play with theater of the mind instead of a battlemat and miniatures, you are more likely to have a situation where the players are imagining themselves as their character and imagining the scene as their character sees it. Battlemats tend to encourage imagining the scene from a view point external to the characters, which bugs the heck out of me as a guy that played theater of the mind for decades.</p><p></p><p>UPDATE: Reading through the thread, there are a couple of things people brought up that I agree with.</p><p></p><p>2e did have the best artwork of any edition of the game. You could legitimately do an art gallery exhibition of 2e artwork and it would be something that would reach a broad audience and not just have nostalgia value.</p><p></p><p>1e/2e did a much better job of keeping non-casters/martials relevant in the game owing to the rules that made casting in combat really difficult - if you got hit, you lost your spell, it took a fraction of the round to cast a spell, and you couldn't move while casting. Combine that with the fact that AD&D arcane casters were SQUISHY and you never felt like you had to play a magic user.</p><p></p><p>And the monster manual entries and treasure tables in AD&D haven't really ever been excelled. The 1e and 2e monster manuals could without much effort be used as campaign source books to create function hexcrawl campaigns. The number appear, rarity, percent chance in lair, and so forth served an important purpose in the game for establishing the game world.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 9013041, member: 4937"] I'm more of a 1e AD&D player than a 2e one, but both editions do better in compelling the players to interact with the environment. One thing I've noticed over the decades is that treasure is becoming increasingly less and less important as loot drops become increasingly less necessary for the promoted playstyle. By 3e, non-magical treasure doesn't really matter unless you are playing with fully fungible wealth that can be freely converted to magical treasure, which itself creates weird metas where groups felt like they couldn't afford to hide the treasure and therefore there was no reason to look for it (literal loot drops). By 4e and 5e, even the magical loot has become "meh". I'm still a big believer in the value of a compelling loot drop and adventures as treasure hunters for gameplay reasons, and AD&D does that better than subsequent editions. Another thing that 2e tended to do better than modern editions is theater of the mind. While miniatures have long been supported and even strongly encouraged by AD&D, in the early years you never really needed them and people coming to AD&D from the Basic boxed set probably never even gave them much thought. I love me some battlemats these days, but one of the big advantages of theater of the mind is that if you play with theater of the mind instead of a battlemat and miniatures, you are more likely to have a situation where the players are imagining themselves as their character and imagining the scene as their character sees it. Battlemats tend to encourage imagining the scene from a view point external to the characters, which bugs the heck out of me as a guy that played theater of the mind for decades. UPDATE: Reading through the thread, there are a couple of things people brought up that I agree with. 2e did have the best artwork of any edition of the game. You could legitimately do an art gallery exhibition of 2e artwork and it would be something that would reach a broad audience and not just have nostalgia value. 1e/2e did a much better job of keeping non-casters/martials relevant in the game owing to the rules that made casting in combat really difficult - if you got hit, you lost your spell, it took a fraction of the round to cast a spell, and you couldn't move while casting. Combine that with the fact that AD&D arcane casters were SQUISHY and you never felt like you had to play a magic user. And the monster manual entries and treasure tables in AD&D haven't really ever been excelled. The 1e and 2e monster manuals could without much effort be used as campaign source books to create function hexcrawl campaigns. The number appear, rarity, percent chance in lair, and so forth served an important purpose in the game for establishing the game world. [/QUOTE]
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What does AD&D 2E do better than 5E?
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