D&D 2E AD&D 2e - Player's Options ?

[Zardnaar]

Exactly.

I find I much prefer approaches that take existing material and tweak it to approaches that make a completely new set of abilities.

Oh also had the artificer. Eberron who lol.

 

[Orius]

I have all four books.

BitD, I used them with fewer restrictions. I wouldn't do that today. Haven't used HLC, at least the crunch since my games never got high enough for that, but it has good advice.

In my last 2e games, C&T, S&P, and S&M were part of the standard table books. I used C&T for the combat rules and weapon tables, S&P for the NWP rules (slightly modified), and S&M for item creation and spells. The classes from S&M were theoretically available, and the psionics rules from S&P if I wanted to use them without drsgging the Psionics Handbook to the table. Didn't use the variant magic systems because most of the players were novices.

Pieces from the books I wouldn't be using are the initiative system and crit tables from C&T, and subabilities, unregulated point buy options and flaws from S&P. The C&T stuff doesn't add anything of value, and the S&P stuff is the most broken elements in the book.

 

[Ath-kethin]

Oh also had the artificer. Eberron who lol.

I'd forgotten about that one!

I actually dug the 3.5 artificer, though. I strongly dislike the 5e version and I don't think I'd ever use it.

 

[the Jester]

Skills & Powers was truly awful and made it extraordinarily easy to build broken characters and to min-max. We used it briefly, then I stopped.

The others all had some good stuff in them; Spells & Magic offered a bunch of new spells even if you didn't use the spellcasting variant systems, and Combat & Tactics was worth it for the first official critical hits alone.

 

[TerraDave]

Used all of them.

It was a learning experience. Just because something looks cool on paper...

As noted upthread, the customizable races and classes could be good for the DM, but very unbalanced and just whacky in the hands of the players. Especially with subability scores (which were also included).

Custom crits were pretty fun, if chart-mastery. Tactical options--some of which made their way into 3E--also were interesting, and you could balance your highish level sword swinger against the casters, but they did slow down play.

I remember liking the discussion of high level play.

 

[DwarfHammer]

Skills & Powers was truly awful and made it extraordinarily easy to build broken characters and to min-max. We used it briefly, then I stopped.

The others all had some good stuff in them; Spells & Magic offered a bunch of new spells even if you didn't use the spellcasting variant systems, and Combat & Tactics was worth it for the first official critical hits alone.

That was the most merciless ruthless murderous critical hit system short of you die on a natural 20.

 

[Orius]

Nah, C&T wasn't Arduin.

 

[DwarfHammer]

I did find true dweomers interesting. They just weren’t something that came up in play.

 

[Zardnaar]

I did find true dweomers interesting. They just weren’t something that came up in play.

Epic magic in 3.0 seemed to be true dweomers revised IMHO.