What were the design goals of 2nd edition?

[Erik Mona]

Don't underestimate the disdain for Gary Gygax that oozed out of the TSR staff even as late as 1999. A lot of these people badmouthed his writing as an almost impulsive matter. I got the impression that it was just part of the corporate culture that came over from Wisconsin.

I'm sure that certain elements just wanted to wash their hands of him and move on to the new generation.

It's also worthy of note that "game balance," in terms of rigorous testing and comparison of one rule to another to ensure measured challenges, is pretty much an artifact of the transition to Wizards of the Coast. Magic: The Gathering (and the political power held by its designers) defined the approach to rules at that company, and thus you have 3e, which is much more balanced than 2e. I think a lot of people would probably say that 4e is even more balanced than 3e, in the "card design" sense of everyone advancing at the same rate and every similar power being more or less equal.

That approach to design is an innovation brought about by Wizards of the Coast in 3rd edition. Prior to that, it was just sort of a "wing it" approach in general.

 

[Wik]

Perhaps the greatest loss was the written tone throughout the game was changed from Gygax writing to his PEERS to one of a company explaining the game to KIDS. It made it nigh-impossible to respect the improvements that were made.

You know, as a kid when 2e came out, I really appreciated this. I could actually use 2e to run games - I couldn't do that with 1e. While BECMI was a good step towards marketing the game to kids, I think 2e worked just as well. So, I don't consider the loss of Gygaxian prose to be a bad thing, necessarily.

I like his writing, and now, looking back, I like my 1e PHB and DMG more than the 2e counterpart. But, were I going to run an old-school game, I'd run 2e.

Their failure was that these were quite short-sighted intents. There wasn't a long-term plan or examination of the game as a whole to see if there weren't a better way to go about anything, much less everything. So we got THAC0 instead of a Base Attack Bonus. Saving throws were still arbitrarily arranged and remained unadjusted by even a whit. Spells were altered a little bit here and there but none of the confusing descriptions were actually rewritten.

Yeah, those would have been nice touches. But I think that redesigning the wheel wasn't a goal at the time - I think they were thinking "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". TSR was still on top of the world at the time, and there wasn't much in the way of real competition. While THAC0 to BAB seems like a no-brainer now, at the time, remember that THAC0 was a pretty big improvement. As for saves - 2e did use ability checks in core rules. And Ability checks replaced saves throughout many of the published materials.

 

[Wik]

Don't underestimate the disdain for Gary Gygax that oozed out of the TSR staff even as late as 1999. A lot of these people badmouthed his writing as an almost impulsive matter. I got the impression that it was just part of the corporate culture that came over from Wisconsin.

I'm sure that certain elements just wanted to wash their hands of him and move on to the new generation.

It's also worthy of note that "game balance," in terms of rigorous testing and comparison of one rule to another to ensure measured challenges, is pretty much an artifact of the transition to Wizards of the Coast. Magic: The Gathering (and the political power held by its designers) defined the approach to rules at that company, and thus you have 3e, which is much more balanced than 2e. I think a lot of people would probably say that 4e is even more balanced than 3e, in the "card design" sense of everyone advancing at the same rate and every similar power being more or less equal.

That approach to design is an innovation brought about by Wizards of the Coast in 3rd edition. Prior to that, it was just sort of a "wing it" approach in general.

Yeah. TSR did have this "one true game" approach that was at odds with Gygax. No denial there. And Wotc definitely did make a better product. Plus, they didn't sue the fans!

As for game balance - I'm not 100% sold on that. While there is no real arguing that 3e is more balanced than 2e, I don't think Balance was ever really a goal. Instead, I think the goal was to emulate what is "realistic" in a sense. Or, to put it another way, 2e was much more towards the "simulation" side of things than later editions. Much of the balance in the game was to encourage players to run characters they might otherwise hate (this is why there were cleric attack spells, and why Clerics advanced in levels so fast). Some of the rules made little sense to me (Fighters require less XP than mages at lower levels, more XP than mages at mid levels, and then require less again sometime after 12th level.... why?), but you know what? The game never felt "unbalanced".

 

[Erik Mona]

I think the game did seem "unbalanced" when only rogues could hear someone approach them, or when some spell levels (I'm thinking 2nd-level cleric spells, off the top of my head) were essentially "dead" levels with very few good choices, or when some spells just killed you on a single die roll.

The decisions behind 2e balance were much more arbitrary than the decisions that went into future editions.

Monster challenge ratings (some sort of guesswork involving perhaps Hit Dice) was probably the worst, but some of the magic items were howlers too.

Nowhere was the "imbalance" of 2e more evident in the RPGA Living City campaign, where cheeseweasel powergamers stretched the system to its absolute limit. If you don't think 2e had power balance issues, chances are you never played in the LC campaign.

 

[Glyfair]

Yeah. TSR did have this "one true game" approach that was at odds with Gygax.

Note that the first rumblings of the "one true game" approach came from Gygax. Mostly it was because AD&D was supposed to be a more consistent game from table to table than OD&D.

He stated in Dragon that if you were using house rules you shouldn't say that you were playing D&D, but that you were playing something else ("variant D&D" was a popular phrase at conventions, for example).

 

[Spatula]

Oh, there was plenty of imbalance in 2e. Some splatbooks were huge powerups (Elves). Some told you that the PHB classes were too good and that you should cripple them (Priests). Psionics was a clunky addon system that didn't work with the existing game. Dual-wielding was pure combat cheese. From what I've heard, a lot of the supplements were authored by freelancers with no real oversight (in terms of playtesting or coordination), so while there's a lot of awesome ideas to be found, the mechanics are terribly uneven.

 

[Desert Hare]

The way I understand, it was largely to clean up, compile, and revise the 1e rules. Basically, get rid of the stuff that didn't work, add stuff from books like UA which worked, and change the rules to reflect how people were playing the game in general. At least, Cook's forward to the 2e PHB seems to indicate that.

This.

People don't seem to remember, but I do clearly, that at the time 2nd Edition was announced it was thought by TSR (or at least it was what they were stating) that the 1E game had become bloated. Just the number of hardbacks that had been published - which of course was NOTHING compared to what would be coming - was too much. People were trying to run games with a pile of hardcovers, dragon articles, and house rules. So, the biggest thing was indeed to recompile, revise, and update the rules to better reflect the way that the game was widely being played.

So, if most people were using a MUCH simplified form of initiative - that's what 2E would use. If they were avoiding constant lookups on the combat tables then 2E would replace the tables with the simpler THAC0 seen in the appendices of the 1E DMG. If people weren't playing Monks or Half-orcs 2E would drop them. Etc.

Their failure was that these were quite short-sighted intents. There wasn't a long-term plan or examination of the game as a whole to see if there weren't a better way to go about anything, much less everything. So we got THAC0 instead of a Base Attack Bonus. Saving throws were still arbitrarily arranged and remained unadjusted by even a whit. Spells were altered a little bit here and there but none of the confusing descriptions were actually rewritten. Perhaps the greatest loss was the written tone throughout the game was changed from Gygax writing to his PEERS to one of a company explaining the game to KIDS. It made it nigh-impossible to respect the improvements that were made.

This makes me wonder. I've purchased the 1E & 2E Core Rules pdfs from rpgnow and admit that the game looks fairly interesting.

I'd be curious if anyone has ever undertaken the endeavor of taking the cleaned up rules from 2E and enginerring them to work with 1E. I wonder what that would look like.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I think the game did seem "unbalanced" when only rogues could hear someone approach them, or when some spell levels (I'm thinking 2nd-level cleric spells, off the top of my head) were essentially "dead" levels with very few good choices, or when some spells just killed you on a single die roll.

Of course, one could interpret this as a "type of balance". If only the Rogue can roll listen checks, it means you need a Rogue, even if he'd worse at combat than any other class, for example.

It is, of course, a questionable balance. Is being able to hear someone sneaking around as useful overall than being able to cast a spell to kill someone?
That depends a lot on what kind of games you run (sneaky games or kill-blast-bash games? )

The more "modern" approach seems to be to balance in every "silo". Everyone can kick ass in combat, everyone has abilities that are important outside of combat. But the latter is still done a lot more "vague" overall. The Non-Combat Silo might just be a little too big.

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

I think the game did seem "unbalanced" when only rogues could hear someone approach them...

I don't remember for certain how 2e described Thief skills, but this certainly wasn't the case in the earlier editions, which used similar mechanics.

Everyone can listen and hear noises. Demi-humans are better at it than humans. Thieves start out the same as demi-humans, but get better and better as levels increase.

Similarly, everyone can climb, but Thieves can climb sheer surfaces, like walls, without using gear. Everyone can sneak and try to move quietly, but Thieves can move silently. Anyone can hide, but a Thief can hide in shadows. Et cetera.

 

[diaglo]

Nowhere was the "imbalance" of 2e more evident in the RPGA Living City campaign, where cheeseweasel powergamers stretched the system to its absolute limit. If you don't think 2e had power balance issues, chances are you never played in the LC campaign.

was that where everyone played an elf from the elf handbook?