D&D 5E So 5E is the Successor to AD&D 2nd Edition? How and How Not?

[Quickleaf]

AD&D 2nd edition is at my nostalgic core for TTRPGs. It was my first edition. It was the one game that I felt got "yanked out" from me when my players demanded we upgrade to a very different 3rd edition. It was the home of my longest and most "meaningful" campaign (in case you're wondering, it served as the catharsis as my players and I navigated entering adulthood and the death of a friend) - in short, it was our "Stand By Me" experience. I am still best friends with the players from that group 25+ years later ... even though we have moved hours apart.

So when I say I loved 2nd Edition AD&D and the nostalgia of it, I really mean that.

In Chris Perkin's recent interview with Stan!, he claimed that 5e was the descendent of 2nd edition. As I bemoan on online forums that there isn't a good modernized update of 2nd edition (as Old School Essentials does for B/X), people say "you've got 5e - that's the 2nd edition retroclone." However, 5e has been a struggle for me and it feels very different from 2e.

Here's a list of differences between 5e and 2e that I think keep 5e from delivering on 2e feel...
Overnight full heal.
Easy access to healing magic (ESPECIALLY Healing Word).
No stat requirements to qualify for "rare" classes (Bard, Druid, Paladin, etc.).
Bonus actions.
HP bloat.
Bounded accuracy.
Monster damage resistances and spell resistances being inconsequential.
Monster special attacks not being threatening (Mummy Rot, Lycanthropy, etc.)
No specialty priests or specialist wizards.

Some differences, such as positive AC I think are good changes and don't really detract from the feel anyway.

What do you think? Do you think 5e feels like 2nd edition? Do you see any other differences? What are the similarities?

It’s interesting that you went to mechanics first as where you get that 2nd edition feel from.

For me, 2nd ed was all about the lore and just going crazy with lore. By my completely anecdotal/personal metric, 5e’s lore is anemic in comparison. Thus, on that front, I would disagree with Chris Perkins’ broad comparison.

I wonder if he had something more specific in mind as the basis for drawing that parallel in his interview with Stan!…

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I would actually agree with the premise that the edition 5E is most like is 2E. It's one I've advanced myself.

As @Reynard correctly says, they have very similar tones/genres (High Fantasy Adventure, which isn't quite what 3E and 4E were about), and they both present fairly simple and straightforward "cleaned up" rules-sets.

Further, for my money, 5E's rules feel like what 3E could have been with a different (better, sorry but genuinely better) design team. There are elements obviously derived from 3E and 4E, but the rules, again, to me, don't feel like they're really extending from either, as much as reconsidering D&D, which ends up in a place more similar to 2E.

 

[Reynard]

As to how it isn't. When I think of Specialty Priest, and then look at 5e Clerics, I let out a sad little sigh.

Such a great idea to be completely abandoned.

 

[pukunui]

2e was my first D&D edition as well, but I honestly can’t remember the mechanics well enough to say whether 5e is a successor to it or not.

I do know that Perkins isn’t the first to make that comparison. Some of my players have said the same thing. (For one of them at least, 5e was their first edition since playing AD&D in their youth.)

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Such a great idea to be completely abandoned.

Speciality Priests are what made me love D&D. Literally the first characters me and my brother played were Speciality Priests (Leira and Torm respectively, odd-couple style!).

But I do see the issue that, if you want elegant or PHB-complete mechanics, that is not a good direction, to give every single god its own SP. On the other hand, I'm maximalist, so screw "PHB-complete", I'll play RC D&D if I care about that, I'd much rather have the fun of an SP made for each and every god!

 

[Ruin Explorer]

In Chris Perkin's recent interview with Stan!, he claimed that 5e was the descendent of 2nd edition.

This is very interesting to me because, you can probably find posts by me quite long ago (maybe even 2014, more like 2017 when we started actually playing it more) saying "This edition got 2E vibes to me!", and if Perkins himself thinks that, that really makes sense to me.

 

[sevenbastard]

2e took the complicated rules of 1e and made them simpler, easier to understand, and better organized.

It increased the crunch level of PC creation by including things like proficiency, weapon specialization, specialist clerics and magic users, and eventually kits. But not to the level of 3e or 4e.

So yeah I can see what he means 2e and 5e or similar in they are medium crunch and beginner friendly.

Now if the 2e team could have done what they wanted and not had to use legacy things like THAC0 and been able to call proficiency skills, we would have got a even simpler system, but TSR insisted on backwards compatibility.

 

[TwoSix]

I think this is also something that has shifted during 5e’s lifecycle, and that shift is one of the biggest reasons behind the large number of folks who really liked early 5e and are finding themselves less and less happy with later 5e and especially post-2024 5e. The D&D Next playtest was very strongly geared towards DMs, touting “rulings over rules,” “DM empowerment,” and making bold claims about how modular design was going to make it possible to pick and choose your favorite aspects of each edition to create the feel you wanted for your table. It was a gradual shift, but over time 5e got more and more player-centric over DM-centric. Unearthed Arcana playtests started being less focused on optional and variant rules, and more focused on new and exciting subclasses. Adventure books started focusing less on doubling as a toolbox for running adventures along similar thematic lines, and more on doubling as a delivery method for new player options that tied in with the themes of the adventure. And the 2024 rules are kind of the culmination of this process - a new version of 5e that uses the same fundamental rules structures to deliver a player-focused experience instead of the DM-focused one D&D Next was built to deliver.

Which, unsurprisingly, mirrors the exact shift we saw in how the rules developed over the '90s (see: Skills and Powers), leading to the replacement of 2e with 3e.

The core of the WotC D&D playerbase, to my mind, is firmly neotrad. They come up with a character concept, first and foremost, and they want to use these rules to create and express that concept. The setting and the adventure are secondary.

Critical Role didn't create that phenomenon, that's been firmly embedded in the player base for a long time.

 

[payn]

Which, unsurprisingly, mirrors the exact shift we saw in how the rules developed over the '90s (see: Skills and Powers), leading to the replacement of 2e with 3e.

The core of the WotC D&D playerbase, to my mind, is firmly neotrad. They come up with a character concept, first and foremost, and they want to use these rules to create and express that concept. The setting and the adventure are secondary.

Critical Role didn't create that phenomenon, that's been firmly embedded in the player base for a long time.

I think the second wind of 3E (PF1) actually brought the neotrad character focus back to the adventure. Paizo's work always tied the characters to the setting and narrative aspects (whether it worked mechanically well or not is another story). So, now the adventure really mattered becasue it wasnt up to the GM to make those character moments shine, it was written right into the AP.

I think if 5E wanted to get some new momentum, it would be trying to embrace that sort of dynamic.

 

[Reynard]

I think if 5E wanted to get some new momentum, it would be trying to embrace that sort of dynamic.

Eww.