Are you part of the "Lost Generation" of RPG gamers?

[Ed_Laprade]

I started around 77/78, but never bought a 2E book. By the time it came out pretty much all of the different stuff from it had been in Dragon mag. So most of our group at the time just photocopied what we wanted to use and didn't bother shelling out another XX bucks. But one or two did, of course. So no, I'm not part of the Lost Gen.

Edit: And, of course, there were UA, OA, &etc. that came out before 2E as well, that had a bunch of stuff that would end up there.

 

[Ulrick]

My older brother introduced me to D&D in 1989 with AD&D. This of course was just as 2e came out. I was hesitant at first, given that I really hadn't much of a chance to explore 1e (my brother eventually just gave me all of his books when he went to college).

Now, I liked 2e. It consolidated a lot of the rules from 1e. And my friends and I had a lot of fun with it, even with splatbooks and Skills and Powers and all that. I loved some of the campaign settings. Still, I drew much of my inspiration from the AD&D books. I used the 1e DMG because I thought it was a lot better than the 2e DMG.

Maybe I am part of the "lost generation." I certainly felt that I was part of some sort of waning in enthusiasm for D&D in 1990s. It seemed harder to get players, but that could have been just my location growing up in Smalltown Iowa.

It also didn't help that the "Satanic Panic" from the 1980s still held over where I lived. In high school, my best friend's parents discovered his D&D books. They took him and his collection out someplace in the country. They burned his books while they prayed for him. Given that I was often the DM for my group of friends, my best friend's parents had a dim view of me.


My high school group resisted the trend that seemed to happen elsewhere--Magic: The Gathering breaking apart D&D groups. Suddenly the few hobby shops in Iowa seemed occupied with Magic players. The D&D stuff got pushed to the side. I even remember even in Dragon occasionally somebody would make a comment on this. When I came to college in the late 1990s, I couldn't wait to meet new players--but everybody was into Magic, Vampire: The Masquerade, or even Shadowrun. D&D just seemed outdated to them

I do remember when my Dragon Magazines stopped coming. I was really concerned about TSR. Even though I felt that the content in Dragon had slipped, I still didn't want to see my favorite game go away.

Paradoxically, when 3e game out. I had initially trouble finding players for it. Suddenly, it seemed that 2e had become vogue again.

Still, this was just my experience and may not represent trends elsewhere.

EDIT: I just thought of something. I've mentioned the article "The Auld Alliance," by Arthur Collins, in Dragon 216 here before. But it bears citing again (emphasis added):

"It troubles me to see what seems to be a major shift among the young gamers of today in how they use the RPG format. We always had seen the rules and game constructs (e.g. the cleric character class) as mere convenience; what we did with them was to enter the world of fantasy.... These kids read the rule books before they read stories that inspired the game. That means their palates have been trained in some strange ways."

Could that be part of the definition of the Lost Generation? D&D had been around for 15 years when 2e came out. The books that inspired the game came out to thrill the generation before mine. As a kid, I was an avid reader before I discovered D&D. But I certainly didn't read any Appendix N stuff (except for the Hobbit). I was too young. As I got older I broadened my horizons. But I shamefully admit that in high school I thought the Dragonlance novels were great ("Wow, they're just like a "D&D" game!")

Does anybody else have similar experiences or thoughts?

 

[Al'Kelhar]

I have a fondness for 2E, largely because I ran the longest and most satisfying campaign of my D&D "career" from 1995-2003, with a constant group of friends, all of whom turned up for every session, and "real life" didn't interfere. We were all in our mid-to-late 20s, with decent jobs and not much responsibility, and meeting every Friday night over pizza and beer to kill stuff was as good a way as any to end the week. I was at the peak of my creativity as a DM, and because 2E rules were a bit wonky, we played by a bunch of house rules and rule 0 was invoked every other round because someone was trying to do something cool - or stupid. Then 3E came around, and suddenly things had structure and organisation, and effects were clearly delineated - and it actually kinda killed the spontanaety we'd previously had. (NB this is just a personal observation of what I experienced, not the start of an edition war).

So I miss 2E, not because it was in any sense a particularly good "system", but because it happened to be the system I was using - and often ignoring - at the time I was having the most fun playing D&D.

Cheers, Al'Kelhar

 

[timASW]

The issue could be that people did not like "2E" the way they liked earlier editions. Even if they played a lot of it.

If you liked classic D&D style...you probably like 1E (or OD&D or B/X) better. If you liked the 2E splats and option books, you probably like 3E better (or maybe 4E). If you liked the Realms, or Dark Sun, or Planescape, you may not link that directly to 2E but see it as its own thing.

This encapsulates me well. I started with AD&D but there were always pieces of it that i didnt really like so i made a lot of houserules back then. Then 3e came out and a lot of those rules (or close enough) became official rules so I'm not too nostalgic about the 2e era.

 

[Serendipity]

No, I started in 1981 but my wife definitely falls into the 'lost generation' category. Interestingly, she feels no particular attachment to the 2e rules, even though that's the game she started with. Bit of a headscratcher that.

 

[Orius]

The big thing about 2e has always been the settings rather than the rules. There's nothing really wrong with the 2e ruleset, but it's not radically different enough from 1e to make a difference like say the differences in 3e or 4e. Still, if I were to go back to running and old school game, I'd probably go 2e, after all I have the books and it would be easier for me to run than 1e. I'd have to do something about the few big problems in the system like exceptional Strength though.

 

[am181d]

There are a couple rules/options in 2e that I prefer to all other editions:

1) I generally prefer Kits to Prestige Classes, Paragon Paths, etc. Yes, they were unbalanced, but they allowed a great deal of flexibility for your character from Level 1.

2) Specialty Priests. Again, the rules weren't perfect, but I appreciated that a worshipper of Thor would be a totally different kind of character than a worshipper of Aphrodite.

If we are only talking about rules (and not settings, the other place where 2e really shined) then those are the two innovations I really want to see make it back into D&D with 5e.

So far, it looks like we're sort of getting Kits with Backgrounds/Specialties, and we have some variation in the Cleric class as well, even if it's not yet as much as I'd want.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I love 2E and wrote a defense of it here: The Bedrock Blog: A Brief Defense of 2nd Edition AD&D

Another poster hit it on the head when he said 2E was largely about setting. But lets not ignore the brown books that offered all kind of kits and optional rules. Options was a big part of whatvmade 2E great IMO.

But I do think we need to avoid 2E's biggest flaws if we want to restore it. Settings are awesome, stuff like the Van Richten guides are incredible resources, but modules that tell you to railroad or to not let the PCs kill certain critical NPCs no matter what (to the point of fudging rolls) have a problem. The criticism that 2E indulged too much in story and imposed it too forcefully on the rpg medium is I think a valid one. That doesn't make 2E all bad. In fact, 2E is my prefered edition. I even love many of the 2E modules despite some major flaws. I would just be careful about importing all of the 2E mindset to your table.

 

[Wombat]

1st Generation Gamer here ... started in 1976...

 

[Mishihari Lord]

I'm not part of that "generation," having started with Holmes Basic in '79 or '80, but I see the point. The 2E books weren't nearly as much fun as the 1E books, but the rules were more efficient. THAC0 was actually a pretty good innovation, despite all the snide comments made nowadays. There was a profusion of material that hasn't been seen since: settings, adventures, support material, classes, and so on.