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

[DwarfHammer]

You do now.

I’m sure you are a great person. But I would hardly say i personally know you. Lol

 

[DwarfHammer]

I did use the spells in spells and magic. And a few odd ball rules. Maybe item creation or something along those lines. But that is what I liked about 2E. Everything was optional. They just offered options and left you to decide what worked for you. There’s not even an official rule for initiative in the PHB. Just 3 different options to choose from.

 

[teitan]

I wasn't a fan. I did like the tactical combat rules but they were generally useless to me because miniatures weren't readily available at the time in an economical fashion. 3e really changed that with the D&D Miniatures game showing the viability of inexpensive plastics and Fiery Dragon with their counter collections. In general I found the Player's Option series to be unnecessary. I did like the High Level Campaigns book. Lots of potential there. I actually didn't like the whole refresh on the look of 2e that came with the Revised books and then these. I thought the aesthetic was awful with all the red line work. WHile the blue of the original printings was not great, that red was just an eye sore. If they'd used the original art for the deluxe books they put out a few years ago I would have snapped them up.

 

[teitan]

I did use the spells in spells and magic. And a few odd ball rules. Maybe item creation or something along those lines. But that is what I liked about 2E. Everything was optional. They just offered options and left you to decide what worked for you. There’s not even an official rule for initiative in the PHB. Just 3 different options to choose from.

That's what they said anyway until you opened a book and they weren't so optional.

 

[Coroc]

Did you buy and use these alternate rules and character options?

Wiki
« Player's Option
In 1995, TSR re-released the core rulebooks for 2nd Edition with new covers, art, and page layouts. These releases were followed shortly by a series of volumes labelled Player's Option, allowing for alternate rules systems and character options, as well as a Dungeon Master Option for high-level campaigns. They consisted of:

• Player's Option: Combat & Tactics
• Player's Option: Skills & Powers
• Player's Option: Spells & Magic
• Dungeon Master Option: High-Level Campaigns

Some of the optional rules included the introduction of a point-based system to allow players to pick and choose parts of classes to make their own class, and a more tactical combat system including attacks of opportunity.»

For my part I tried to get a campaign started Skills & Powers but we never finished character creation. The players did like all the added complexity.

I have the combat and tactics and the High level campaign, the best I took out of these books were the introduction of paragon monsters (Normal mobs ramped up with boss stats and abilities)

I could not make much use of the other stuff, because other than normal accessory books like complete book of humanoids / elves / thieves etc etc. which all added very good fluff - (Monster mythology is one of the best along with humanoids, get your hands on those two at least. Also complete book of drow is good) - these Player option and DM option added crunch. Loads of it. Not accounted for in all the other material.

Basically if you were to use this stuff (the option crunch) you would have to update every darn single mob in an adventure and some more.

Plus you would have to retrain your players. Some called this D&D 2.5 and tbh it is an own system.
One of the options e.g. was to split each attribute into two, so e.g. you get ?comeliness? and
?leadership? out of charisma I might remember the names for those subattributes wrong, cannot look atm. but the principle is true.
So you would divide the pure beauty aspects of the Cha attribute from the skill which makes not so beautiful people still be convincing charismatic leaders.

That is so deep into the 2e base math that it is its own system and a pretty complicated one by that.

 

[Enrico Poli1]

HLC: love almost all material. I love high level play. Bought the hardback.
C&T: love part of the material (proficiencies, weapons). Bought the hardback.
S&P: disliked almost all material - made things overly complicated. Didn't buy the book (a friend did)
S&M: same as S&P but substitute "disliked" with "hated".

 

[Zardnaar]

Tested a lot of rules, Skills and Powers is fine for the DM, terribad for players. Point buy races and classes are interesting.

Spells and magic. Used the new spells and wizard schools. Treated it as errata for schools and domains.

High Level book. Big meh the advanced monster stuff was useful.

Combat and Tactics. Lots of good stuff to pick and choose from.

 

[cbwjm]

Used the first 3 books but I didn't own the last. Sadly though, it was towards the end of high school and everyone went their separate ways so didn't get to use them much. I can't even remember the exact rules we used, it was too long ago.

 

[R_J_K75]

We used bits and pieces of everything except for the High Level campaign. I liked Spells and Magic the best, pretty sure that was the book with the pretty long list of spell components and the wizard lab creation rules. We got quite a bit of use out of those books. One guy refused to spend $2-$3 on a miniature for Combat & Tactics so we drank all his beer and gave him the boot. I think its safe to say that some parts of Combat and Tactics, (and Alternity) were the prototype for 3E. I thought the DM Screen that came out to accompany those 4 books was one of the best ever, heres whats left of mine.

 

[Mark Hope]

Yeah, like others, we use parts of these. I've used spell points as a player and really liked them, and we used character points to tweak existing classes (although building them from scratch was deemed to broken to bother with). I use parts of High Level Campaigns, some of the weapon specialisation/mastery stuff, some weapon, shield, and armour info, siege engines, wizard specialists, magic item creation etc. Bits and pieces here and there. Got a lot of mileage out of the books, I suppose.