AD&D 2E What does AD&D 2E do better than 5E?

Valetudo · May 4, 2023

I always loved add multiclassing.

Celebrim · May 4, 2023

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.

Malerai_Kayne · May 4, 2023

Retreater said:
Not trying to stop you with such a project, but I can say from experience that attempting just one of these port overs from 2E to 5E (in my case, the entire psionics system), was a very arduous process I didn't complete.
I think it would be simpler to take the ideas you like from 5E and port them into 2E. Flip the numbers and you can get positive AC. Increase HD for player characters if it's too lethal. Advantage/ Disadvantage is so intuitive you don't even need to write it down.
Boom - that's everything good (I can remember anyway) about 5e.

I know what you mean. And I have to admit psionics would be a whole other thing. This is a passion project for me and an opportunity to exercise my creativity, see how far I get. So far, so good. As much as this thread is about what 2E does better, there is the flipside of that, too. It's not like 2E doesn't have elements that annoy me. The trick is, as someone mentioned, that 5E is more difficult to mod as the design is more integrated. But if you don't shy away from doing the work, it can be done. For lethality alone, I modified death saves, what happens at 0 hp, hit point and hit dice recovery, rests, even spell selection.

Velderan · May 4, 2023

Atomoctba said:
I know lots of people will disagree, but I love how, in 2e, the world did not need set "proper level challenges". You could have a party of 10th level characters that slashes against 1/2 HD kobolds (Dragon Mountain, anyone?) or a 3rd level party that meets a beholder in a random encounter. That made the world feel more real for me as a player. I never had the illusion that all challenges would be proper to my level and take care with my actions. Also, run away was almost always a valid option

Yeah, I recently started flipping through my 2e books trying to remember how I ran encounters to balance them. Digging through a few random notes I had from 25 years ago, I quickly realized the answer is I didn't. lol

Celebrim · May 5, 2023

Velderan said:
Yeah, I recently started flipping through my 2e books trying to remember how I ran encounters to balance them. Digging through a few random notes I had from 25 years ago, I quickly realized the answer is I didn't. lol

I had a sense based on experience of what was too much and if I was worried I'd theory craft expected damage per round for the party versus the monster(s). In theory there were guidelines in the appendixes of the 1e DMG, but I rarely consulted them. By and large, I winged it.

That said, I ran 3e D&D in much the same way. EL, ECL and CR was inaccurate enough that experience was a better guide.

Willie the Duck · May 5, 2023

James Gasik said:
Are system shock and resurrection survival good things? Hear me out, because this is based on my experience with the game over the years.

-System shock seems to exclusively come up when bad things happen to you (I count aging due to Haste as a bad thing, YMMV). So as if being aged by a ghost or polymorphed against your will isn't bad enough, we have to tack on this percent chance you also just die? How is that a good thing? The game already has plenty of ways you can die due to circumstances out of your control, now you get to add "man, too bad you didn't have a 16 Constitution instead of a 17" as well?

-Resurrection Survival. It's not easy to get Raised from the dead in D&D. It's expensive, hard to find a caster who can or is willing to cast it (unless you're lucky to have one in your party). There are already penalties inherent in the game for being brought back to life, and a maximum value of times this could be attempted in the first place. So given all of that, where's the benefit in "you did the quest, you paid the priest, he goes to cast the spell and...you die anyways. Too bad you didn't have a 13 Constitution instead of a 12, huh?"

If this is about stat dumping or people playing Elves (who have their own woes when it comes to returning to life), and penalizing people who choose to dump Con, I'd like to point out there are other ability scores you can skimp on that players tend to find more attractive to do, like Charisma or even Wisdom (which has a fairly trivial penalty to as low as a 5!).

Now most people I've played with wouldn't want a Wisdom of a 5, but sometimes that's how the dice fall, and I don't see any low ability score being really worse than any other in the grand scheme of things, but the subsystem for system shock and resurrection survival penalizing you for not having a high value in Constitution seems extra punishing for no real benefit, given the sheer amounts of ways you can already die or have death be permanent to begin with.

Errr. Okay, 'good things' is sufficiently vague as to be hard to answer. The whole expanse of multiple unformulaic systems was part of the charm of that era, and as such has its' own value. However, on a whole, there was also a lot of unnecessary complexity and doubling-up of costs or benefits, etc.

Aging-as-a-cost/attack and level-drain were both these weird things that were one part super-scary (and thus useful) and hectic/low-key annoying*. One downside to aging as a cost was that it mattered if and only if** you cared about your character long-term or wanted to realistically RP someone making tough decisions between immediate success/survival and long term survival/lifespan. If it was a high-level one-shot, your wizard or cleric could haste and wish and resurrect at will. Adding a 'you might die' component to it might have been a means of addressing that (or just filling in the logical places where a system shock roll might be necessary). Exactly why Haste picked up an aging hit between editions, I do not know.
*the later particularly once it could be reversed--sometimes--meaning you had to keep track of multiple XP totals as well as time since the level drain and understanding the rules for what happened with the XP you've gained since the level drain if you managed to get it reversed
**baring some crazy long campaign or insane starting and max age rolls or just tons of ghosts

In general, there were quite a few 'oh look, you're dead' or 'oh look, you're perma-dead' moments with only nominal correlation to any kind of incentivization structure. Actual death-traps are part of the primary-game-loop of caution/random-encounter-check tension the game was built upon. Cursed items taught you to definitely look gift horses in the mouth*. Going to all the trouble to retrieve a fallen comrades' body, negotiating with a local cleric to cast a raising spell (taking their own aging hit and system shock), and then at the last minute getting back the result of 'oops, that was all wasted, this character is not revivable' -- no, it is not clear what tension or lesson that provides (other than 'don't get killed,' which, yeah, that's one upon which no one was unclear).
*also not to put on necklaces without another character having alter reality/limited wish/wish prepared or attempt to use a bowl of water elemental command without someone else having a growth potion or animal growth/enlarge/wish prepared -- y'know, reasonable precautions.

Constitution was already so valuable to most characters (being so armored or quick with rocket-tag-rockets you just never needed to worry about your HP just wasn't a thing), so one more reason you wanted it as high as possible was definitely not necessary for any particular reason. At the same time, rewarding fortune with further fortune is completely on brand for the game (such as good stat rolls getting the basic effects of the stats, but also access to upscaled class options and level limits).

In general, I think the game could have used some re-think on scores once 'arrange-to-taste' became an accepted attribute method, although I'm sure the great big optional flags alongside everything other than 3d6 down the line was all the cover anyone thought they needed. For that matter, having a Con stat in the first place after it became 'this is where you place your second-highest roll' is something of a marginal benefit to the game in total.

Retreater said:
I have had so many more characters die in WotC era D&D than in AD&D. But that's because I had no illusion of balance and tried to avoid challenge in the early days, always rolled behind a screen, and kept the PC's HP in a notebook so I could make sure they didn't die. Actually playing by the rules, TSR-era games are grinders.

I feel like most people who played in the TSR era had some house rules to keep the game on the rails. I'm sure now that I said this, people will pipe up saying they played A/D&D version ______ completely by-the-book, and more power to you if you did, but man does it seem impenetrable (or at least a massive case of throwing massive amounts of new characters at the RNG until one makes it to a plateau-point alive). At least unless they played using the style EGG and co apparently used (6-12 players, plus lots of retainers/henchmen/hirelings, playing different character from large arsenal of PCs so you could level up one while the other was healing, sticking to 10' wide dungeon corridors until well into your character career, etc.) that didn't quite get communicated in most of the versions of the print game. I say that because a lot of the math and mechanics never got updated from then.

mach1.9pants · May 6, 2023

Since new characters started at level 1, bringing back to life has always been important in my old school games. But 3e onwards that really didn't work, sadly

James Gasik · May 6, 2023

mach1.9pants said:
Since new characters started at level 1, bringing back to life has always been important in my old school games. But 3e onwards that really didn't work, sadly

Did you ever have to find ways to "fast track" new characters to get them up to levels where they were useful to the rest of the party, or did the xp they gained from hiding in the back and letting the higher level characters do all the heavy lifting balance things out?

I ran one game where a 1st level Thief joined a party of 5th-6th level characters back in 2e, and they were not only useless, they didn't last the session, so against all the advice of my fellow DM's, I let that player come in with a 4th level character instead, and in fact, I stopped starting players at level 1 entirely, since it made my life a lot easier as a DM, but I've always wondered how it played out for other groups.

Retreater · May 7, 2023

James Gasik said:
but I've always wondered how it played out for other groups.

We always started replacement characters at the midpoint XP to reach one level lower than the lowest levelled character.
So if there was a mix of 4th and 5th level characters, and a 5th level character died, he'd come back at the mid point of 3rd.
There was a good bit of level drain back then too, so levels weren't steady.