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What were the design goals of 2nd edition?
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<blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 4681124" data-attributes="member: 32740"><p>This.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>Their failure was that these were quite short-sighted intents. There <em>wasn't</em> 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 <em>everything</em>. 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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Man in the Funny Hat, post: 4681124, member: 32740"] 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 [I]wasn't[/I] 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 [I]everything[/I]. 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. [/QUOTE]
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