Why all the Second Edition Haters?

[the Jester]

The only rules I miss from 2e were the cleric spheres, but they needed lots of work. 3e is something of a step backwards in that respect, imho.

 

[The_Gneech]

Loved the fluff text of all the Lankhmar stuff.

Loved the fluff text of The Complete Book of Thieves and the campaign design book of the same series (the title of which escapes me at the moment).

Hated all rules, and used the fluff text as source material for my Fantasy Hero campaign because the AD&D rules were so bad.

-The Gneech

 

[MarauderX]

That said, 2e almost had me leaving D&D entirely.

Yup, it did it for me. I had more fun reading fantasy novels that made more 'sense' than any 2E campaign I had been in. I took time off since I thought the designers were taking the game over a cliff, then started up an OD&D game. It took me a while to get fully into 3.0 as I was joining groups I didn't get along with, but the feel of the game, just in the PHB alone, was back. It oozed with the stuff of adventures, and before long I got over my jaded bitterness for WotC and started gaming once again.

 

[Remathilis]

Wow! Thread Necromancy! Mwaaa haaa ha!

I still have my personal memories of D&D, but these days, I can't personally see going back. That said, I DO miss the concept for kits. It could have been a good way of distiguishing wu-jen from wizards, knights from mercenaries, and cat-burglars from assassins without having a large variety of classes/PrCs. However, they soon went from character creation concepts to cherry-picked tweakfests. Sigh...

 

[dcollins]

Why does no one have fond memories of 2e?

I don't want to debate whether 1e/3e was better or whatnot, but it seems that that few people have any real fond memories of 2e, or at least not enough to pull out the core books and run it. There is no sites dedicated to it, no messageboards full of gushers, no "keep 2e alive" threads.

2nd Ed. had no soul.

1st Ed. AD&D had lots of flavor, soul, and spirit to it. It works a labor of love by Gygax and his close associates. It grew out of actually weekly play of the game. It was what the first players to experience RPGs fell in love with. Even if it had some clunky parts to the mechanics, the idea communicated by the rules was very clear and very strong and lots of fun.

2nd Ed. was a half-hearted hack job on the rules to rationalize getting Gygax's name of the books after he left. Most of it was ust a huge copy-and-paste ob. The parts that were changed were done in a way that didn't understand how those parts fit into playing the overall game.

3rd Ed. D&D, again, was written by an intense core unit of people who loved playing the game (Tweet, Cook, Williams). It was very heavily playtested. The parts all seem to work together. Even if it's rather complex in some areas, it's clear that a lot of time, effort, and consideration were put into it. It generally works very very well.

Now, we're back to 3.5 Ed. which looks a lot like 2nd Ed. in the motivations and execution.

Essay on 1st Ed.: www.superdan.net/grtdnd/grtdnd1.html
Essay on 3.5 Edition: www.superdan.net/down3-5.html

 

[Count Arioch the 28t]

I played 2E. I didn't like it. IT made me quit until 3E came out.

If you're looking for better answers than that, you're going to be disapointed, it's all a matter of opinion.

 

[dead]

I have loads of fond memories of 2E! I played it for its entire life, some 11 years or so.

I think the 2E haters are folks who only played it for a little while and then 3E came in. They claim that 3E is not a direct progression of AD&D 2nd Edition. I disagree, 3E is clearly AD&D to me. It's just been cleaned up with respect to task resolution. Now you roll a die and must beat a DC instead of looking at your character sheet and checking against a skill/ability. 3E also removed all of the arbitrary restrictions of 2E; but who obeyed these anyway?

 

[Thorin Stoutfoot]

I don't hate 2e

I didn't hate 2e. I just dropped out of RPGs just as 2e hit, and came back a year after 3e. From what I could tell, I didn't miss much going from 1e to 3e.

 

[Wormwood]

Add my voice to the chorus of "2e drove me away from D&D, 3e brought me back."

 

[Saeviomagy]

In first ed, there were no rules for anything beyond combat and magic. So the GM was free to make it up.

In 3rd ed, there are rules for just about anything, and they're not too difficult to find. The GM doesn't need to make anything up.

In 2nd ed, there was something in the middle - enough rules that the GM wasn't free to make stuff up, but few enough that you could rarely find the rule you needed, and the GM would be forced to make something up. Furthermore rules were so difficult to find that often the GM would makes something up, and it'd be wrong, and you'd never be sure whether a rule really existed or not.

I much prefer 3rd ed to 1st ed, because I like having rules to use - after all, if I'm just making stuff up, there are plenty of systems that I can do that with that are far, far better than any version of D&D.

I prefer anything to 2nd ed, because it gives the worst of both worlds from rules-light and rules-heavy, and adds in a good dollop of total confusion.