AD&D, looking backwards, and personal experiences

[Lanefan]

I get the cries of "betrayal!" from the 1e crowd over the removal of Demons, Devils, Assassins and Half-orcs (though a part of me asks: were the latter really played all that often?)

Over the long run here Part-Orcs seem to get played about as often as Gnomes, a bit less often than Hobbits, Dwarves and Part-Elves, and a lot less often than Elves and Humans.

Right now in the game I play in (as opposed to DM) the two highest level PCs are both Part-Orcs: one is 10th, another 9th, nobody else in the game is higher than 8th.

Lanefan

 

[Stormonu]

Unfortunately, it got mired in some really poor products (Complete books) and the ousting of much of Gygax's work and voice. Still, if given a choice between the two, I'd much rather play 2e than 1e.

Ah man, the complete books was among my favorite additions to 2E. Though, you did have to be careful with it - especially anything after PHR4 - Complete Wizard.

I get the cries of "betrayal!" from the 1e crowd over the removal of Demons, Devils, Assassins and Half-orcs (though a part of me asks: were the latter really played all that often?) I still find 2e a vastly better system.

Well, I did - I grandfathered half-orcs into my 2E game, and assassins (and monks). Demons and Devils though, I happily did without.

TSR might have done well to make a "2.5" that fixed some of those issues, but I digress...

Well, they did, sorta with the Player's Options books.

 

[Remathilis]

Ah man, the complete books was among my favorite additions to 2E. Though, you did have to be careful with it - especially anything after PHR4 - Complete Wizard.

Well, I did - I grandfathered half-orcs into my 2E game, and assassins (and monks). Demons and Devils though, I happily did without.

Well, they did, sorta with the Player's Options books.

I actually like the Complete Books, but they have to be handled very gently. Some are great (Bard's Wizard's) some are terrible (Elves, Priest's).

By the time I got into 2e, Half-orcs were in Complete Humanoid's Handbook, but they still weren't played often. I used various homebrew monks and assassins until Scarlet Brotherhood restored both to proper form using the 2e rules. However, there is a reason why my Planescape Monsters Compendium is the most dog-eared of all of them...

Player's Options is a tricky devil. On the one hand, a lot of stealth-errata and game fixes were introduced (Spell Lists in Spells & Magic, a better unarmed combat system in Combat & Tactics, as well as rebalanced kits and psionics in Skills & Powers) but the character point system (as well as C&Ts Initiative Phase system and S&M's Spell Points) broke more than it fixed.

I think when they re-did the PHB/DMG for the Black Book set, they should have bit the bullet and clarified some rules, corrected some things, and generally "improved" the game, not just the books.

 

[MerricB]

I get the cries of "betrayal!" from the 1e crowd over the removal of Demons, Devils, Assassins and Half-orcs (though a part of me asks: were the latter really played all that often?)

Half-orcs, I'm pretty sure were. Assassins, not so much.

 

[MerricB]

Ah man, the complete books was among my favorite additions to 2E. Though, you did have to be careful with it - especially anything after PHR4 - Complete Wizard.

Complete Fighter was "Wow! This is great!"

Complete Thief was "Interesting - some good stuff here."

Complete Priest was "What the hell?"

The 'Complete' Priest destroyed my faith in the Complete books. Even to my young and not-particularly-aware-of-game-balance mind, I was aware that there was something wrong when the replacement system produced characters that were 99% strictly inferior to the base Cleric.

I loved the idea of the book, sure, but it was done in such a ham-fisted way.

The earliest big campaigns I ran of D&D were AD&D 2E. I'd played and run 1E earlier, but hadn't run big ongoing campaigns. That changed in 1990 when I started University, and I ran campaigns of 2E for the first two years. (After that, I played and ran Amber a lot).

Later on, when I got back to D&D, I ran a very good campaign with the Player's Option books. I loved those books, broken though they could be. I especially loved Combat & Tactics, which prefigured the miniature game that 3E would become.

This year, I've been running AD&D 1E again, and loving it - though there are many, many rough points in the rules, the core is strong and the character options suit our needs. I don't think I'd ever run pure 2E again: it'd have to be a hybrid system, using a lot of the 1E versions of the classes.

Cheers!

 

[Stormonu]

Complete Priest was "What the hell?"

The 'Complete' Priest destroyed my faith in the Complete books. Even to my young and not-particularly-aware-of-game-balance mind, I was aware that there was something wrong when the replacement system produced characters that were 99% strictly inferior to the base Cleric.

I have to admit, I see little value in the Complete Priest book. The kits were crap and while you could make a priest of just about anything, most of the resulting spell lists were horrid for adventuring. The big question I always had was why it had no new spells in it whatsoever.

 

[Hussar]

Yeah, Complete Priest was pretty bad. Although the Monk they had in it could actually be playable. Not fantastic, but, playable, with the right spheres. Helped that the martial arts rules were pretty badly broken.

OTOH, you had Faiths and Avatars which turned clerics into insane powerhouses. Yikes. Someone loved clerics when they wrote that one.

To be fair though, while the Illusionist kinda got dragged down (did anyone actually play a 1e illusionist? I never saw one), the clerics with spheres was very, very cool.

 

[Mallus]

The Complete Bard's book was good, too.

 

[Mallus]

These days, I'm not looking backward at AD&D. I'm staring it in the face. After years of running 3e and 4e, I find myself slightly over a year into an AD&D that was started, in all honestly, as a lark on a dare.

I've probably voiced most of the common criticisms of AD&D over the 27 years since I was introduced to RPGs through it. I've made house rules. I've moved on. I've mocked the various D&D-isms that place the game at odds with the fantasy fiction I enjoy.

And you know what? I'm kinda loving it. At it's core, it's a very simple system. I find I can run a session --while steadily drinking wine-- off of a handful of pages in the DMG and PHB (I lost my DMs screen ages ago). And the charts! So many wonderful charts from which unplanned situations can emerge. Why I've even made my peace with random monsters and crazy-quilt nonsense dungeons.

To be fair, the success I'm having with AD&D now is, in large part, due to all the wonderful/practical advice I've read over the years at places like ENWorld, from people with real insight into pre-3e D&D.

AD&D is not my end-all-be-all system. No system is. It's just the right tool for the job, for now. There are dimensions of play present in the later editions which are simply absent in AD&D --hey, I like char-op, too, and more robust mechanical modeling-- and when we miss that sufficiently I imagine we'll change systems.

 

[Steely_Dan]

Half-orcs, I'm pretty sure were. Assassins, not so much.

My very first character (I haven't had many) was a Half-Elf Assassin, so I was seriously bummed when the 2nd Ed PHB removed the Assassin and Monk (one of my favourite classes of all time), but I soon realised how easy it was to plonk them into 2nd Ed.

I've plonked the 1st Ed Monk into 5th Ed, with a few tweaks of course.