D&D 5E what is it about 2nd ed that we miss?

[Psikerlord#]

double post

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

3) Much more dangerous. At zero hp, from memory, you were out of any further fights until you had a sleep. That was big. At -10 you were dead. No whack a mole issue.

AFB, but I think you were out of it for a week, not just a sleep. Dropping to 0 HP also wiped all spells from your memory. Basically, it was a mission kill, and the fact that you weren't actually dead didn't change the fact that you had no further impact on the adventure.

 

[Ancalagon]

AFB, but I think you were out of it for a week, not just a sleep. Dropping to 0 HP also wiped all spells from your memory. Basically, it was a mission kill, and the fact that you weren't actually dead didn't change the fact that you had no further impact on the adventure.

... I don't remember that... I mean re-memorizing your spells shouldn't take you more than a day...

 

[Maxperson]

AFB, but I think you were out of it for a week, not just a sleep. Dropping to 0 HP also wiped all spells from your memory. Basically, it was a mission kill, and the fact that you weren't actually dead didn't change the fact that you had no further impact on the adventure.

You have a strange idea of what a mission kill is and/or what no further impact means. You got your spells back after you rested and it was rare that you were unable to rest during the adventure.

 

[Maxperson]

... I don't remember that... I mean re-memorizing your spells shouldn't take you more than a day...

It depends on your level. One 9th level spell was like 90 minutes to memorize, so at 18th level it could take you a few days, but it was still done and you went on with the adventure. At low and mid levels, one night did it.

 

[evilbob]

So what is it? Is it the multi-classing? Bounded accuracy? The absence of warlocks, barbarians etc? The saving throws? The less HP? The initiative system? Spell disruption? No cantrips? what?

I have been thinking about a related question as we are about to start CoS. The thing about D&D now that was different before is: since 3.0, D&D has been more about explicitly defining things. Vampires have X powers and this is how they work. Your character is a fighter. They can do X, Y, and Z, but never A, B, or C. When you level up, here are your three choices. Pick one. All these powers work exclusively inside combat. Your power is: "good at greatsword." Now role play that.

I think older D&D systems - and many, many other systems that aren't D&D - aren't so explicit. This makes them harder to adjudicate, harder to balance, and you rely much more on the instincts of the GM that way (which can be good or very, very bad). But it doesn't bind you, either. Your powers aren't just "good at greatsword." They're whatever you can reasonably think of doing with whatever it is you happen to have. Unbounded. Implicit instead of explicit.

D&D went down an explicit path with 3.0 (and SUPER explicit with 4.0) because balance was a primary concern. They also wanted portability; if you played D&D with this group, you could switch to that other group and have a reasonable idea of what's going on. This is good: it helped expand the hobby and made it more accessible. But it also became a focus.

Eventually you can get to a point where when you ask a player what their character is doing, they look at their sheet for what they can do.

Other games - and early D&D - was not so explicit. You asked someone what their character was doing and they thought about what their character would do, not what they could do. The less definition your boundaries have, the more you can expand them. Obviously this has downsides, too - unreasonable people with no boundaries will ruin any game, period. 3.0 tried to reign that in: it tried to enforce you to not be a jerk. But the unbounded wackiness was also more creative. It also let you do things you could never do if the boundaries were more explicit, because you never would have tried them.

I remember reading an article some guy wrote about his childhood D&D experiences, and his RBDM, who was the biggest RB there ever was. He constantly killed them on a whim, and eventually they found out he wasn't even following rules - he made it all up as they went along. He was literally torturing them, emotionally, like a sadistic [insert naught word of choice]. But although the author played in games later where things were different, and tried other stuff, he actually had a (Stockholm-y) wistfulness for the crazy insane death-at-any-second game. Because anything could happen: there were no rules. It was interactive storytelling at its best.

Most would agree that a base line of rules helps set expectations and give things some cohesion. Most would believe that without ANY rules, you couldn't play a role playing game. Of course neither of those are true; I know for a fact because we used to play what I would call "free style" games all the time. And honestly those are, on the whole, still much more memorable.

My point being: back in the day, there were fewer rules. And sometimes this was a good thing.

Edit: Specifically, the part I quoted is a good example, because you're asking: which rule being different made it more fun? My response would be: you're coming at it from the wrong perspective. Not having so many things explicitly defined made it more fun. What rule did what is just personal preference.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

You have a strange idea of what a mission kill is and/or what no further impact means. You got your spells back after you rested and it was rare that you were unable to rest during the adventure.

Alternately, I could be misremembering the 2nd edition rules. It's been over two decades since I actively played 2nd edition, and the last time I reread the Death's Door rules was a couple of months ago (for an Internet thread, not actual play). But my AFB memory is telling me that it took far longer than one sleep to recover from being reduced to zero HP.

Also, you didn't regain spells just by resting. Resting gave you, at best, the opportunity to spend time re-memorizing spells: 10 minutes per spell level. A high-level wizard could potentially require a full day to rememorize his spells after expending them all.

Oh, here we go:

Hovering on Death's Door
You might find that your campaign has become particularly deadly. Too many player characters are dying. If this happens, you may want to allow characters to survive for short periods of time even after their hit points reach or drop below 0.


When this rule is in use, a character can remain alive until his hit points reach -10. However, as soon as the character reaches 0 hit points, he falls to the ground unconscious.


Thereafter, he automatically loses one hit point each round. His survival from this point on depends on the quick thinking of his companions. If they reach the character before his hit points reach -10 and spend at least one round tending to his wounds--stanching the flow of blood, etc., the character does not die immediately.


If the only action is to bind his wounds, the injured character no longer loses one hit point each round, but neither does he gain any. He remains unconscious and vulnerable to damage from further attacks.


If a cure spell of some type is cast upon him, the character is immediately restored to 1 hit point--no more. Further cures do the character no good until he has had at least one day of rest. Until such time, he is weak and feeble, unable to fight and barely able to move. He must stop and rest often, can't cast spells (the shock of near death has wiped them from his mind), and is generally confused and feverish. He is able to move and can hold somewhat disjointed conversations, but that's it.


If a heal spell is cast on the character, has hit points are restored as per the spell, and he has full vitality and wits. Any spells he may have known are still wiped from his memory. (Even this powerful spell does not negate the shock of the experience.)

So you're partly right--it's not just a sleep, but it's not a week either. It's a day of bed rest.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

So you're partly right--it's not just a sleep, but it's not a week either. It's a day of bed rest.

It's also worth emphasizing that, as you'd quoted, Death's Door was an optional. The DM was supposed to implement Death's Door as a mercy on the players, if they were despairing because their characters died too frequently.

The basic rule was just that you die at 0, and while Raise Dead still existed, the circumstances surrounding it were much more restrictive and expensive.

As compared to 5E, where some people discuss surfing the zero-wave as preferable to healing, and even death can be reversed with no side-effects as early as level 5.

 

[Dorian_Grey]

Disclaimer: Everything below is strictly my opinion. I don't believe that there is any quantitative way to evaluate a game system that would apply to every human being. Some people will like what I write, some people won't - and I'm totally okay with that! What I find fun and what others find fun are probably not the same thing, and frankly the world would be a terribly boring place if it was.

I've been trying to think about how to answer this question without going off on a rant! What it comes down to, in my mind, is this:

1. Backgrounds & World Building
2. "Modular" Style Tools
3. Rules as Optional vs. Rules as Written

I'll tackle these below:

Backgrounds & World Building
One of the big things that I loved about AD&D 2nd Edition was the emphasis on campaign worlds, but also on providing so much fluff that you could go for years without exhausting it all. As an example of this I purchased three books shortly after publication: Creative Campaigning, Arms & Equipment Guide, and Castle Guide. Those were the old Dungeon Master Guide Rules Supplements or the Blue Books. I still use them today. I have not even tackled 25% of the material in them. At the rate I'm going, I'll use up everything in those books by the time I turn 140. I don't think I'm going to make it to 140 years old!

But it gets worse. Then the Player's Option series was released. Now, a lot of people hate on those books - they see them as rules creep. And they're right if you take them as "Player's Options" literally. However, each started with a very firm statement: NOTHING IN THIS BOOK IS KOSHER WITHOUT DM APPROVAL. I paraphrase, but I'll come back to that in my third point.

Modular Style Tools
Due to not being so concerned about balance as creating a fun experience, the rules often were fairly disjointed. For example, a thief with a 9 dexterity could still do well because their thief skills (%) could still be fairly high - not everything was tied to one universal mechanic. A low INT wizard, still used wizard saves instead of being hit by that low INT score. Secondary skills and proficiency skills were all optional, but if you added them they could be as granular or as open as you like. No single tool in the AD&D 2nd Edition set was required for any other tool to work. So the player tools (classes, races) didn't need the kit tool to handle anything the DM had in his or her toolbox (monsters, traps). More modules could be put on the table (Spells & Magic, Combat & Tactics) and the DM could pick and choose what he or she wanted to include without the level of pain that happens with 3rd and 4th.

This is one of the reasons I feel the OGL content for 3rd often met such resistance - although the concepts included were often fine trying to incorporate it into a single mechanic system was so difficult. Additionally, I feel happiest about adding rules to 5e when I break away from the single mechanic system.

Rules as Optional vs. Rules as Written
Here is the official statement in Player's Option: Spells & Magic on the rules within the book:

"Like any of the PLAYER'S OPTION books, the material in this supplement is optional. The DM is free to use as much or as little of Spells & Magic as he wishes to in his campaign." - Richard Baker, Pg 7​

Emphasis mine. Does the DM not like a new spell? No problem. Does the DM only want to include the madness rules? That's a'okay! Including, or not including, any one specific aspect of the game does not have a negative aspect on any other aspect of the game. Now, 3rd and 4th included some comment to this effect but there was a much bigger emphasis on the rules as written and how the rules HAD to be used in order for "balance" to be maintained, or whatever. Which is exactly what Wizards of the Coast wanted. Even if you did decide to incorporate or remove a specific aspect of something, it could actually be damaging. As a result, you're better off just leaving it alone. 5th edition has gone back to "What the DM says, goes" and I like that but the rules are still very tightly bound together.

On the other hand, the 3rd Edition equivalent, Tome & Blood, was listed as optional - but much of it's material, such as metamagic would become standardized within the Wizards of the Coast thinking. Additionally, the rule book provided clarification and commentary on official rules within the PHB that WERE direct commentaries from WotC. So yes, you could ignore it - but the rules commentary nature (something that Spells and Magic attempted to avoid) reinforced the Rules as Written paradigm.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

It depends on your level. One 9th level spell was like 90 minutes to memorize, so at 18th level it could take you a few days, but it was still done and you went on with the adventure. At low and mid levels, one night did it.

In 1e it was actually 15 minutes per spell level per spell, so it took even longer to memorize your full compliment.

10 minutes per spell level per spell was in 2nd edition, where the default rule was changed to death at 0 hp rather than -10 (because somebody decided to try to make the game harder, for some reason).