D&D 2E [COMPLETE] Looking back at the limited series: Player's Option, Monstrous Arcana, Odyssey, and more!

[Alzrius]

Before getting into the next book on the list, I'm going to take a moment to rant about something that's long irked me:

The Player's/DM's/Campaign Option books are NOT AD&D 2.5!

I know that's a designation that's entirely fan-made, and which is retroactively applied, but it's always made me roll my eyes, because it's conveying upon these books - as well as AD&D 1st Edition's Unearthed Arcana, which is similarly referred to as AD&D 1.5 - with a status that they don't actually possess.

The salient factor, at least as I see it, isn't so much that these books present alterations to various aspects of the Core Rules. If that was the sole determinant, then the 3.5 Unearthed Arcana should be...I'm guessing 3.6? After all, "3.75" is widely regarded as being Pathfinder 1st Edition. So clearly there's more to it than just altering the Core Rules.

And really, Pathfinder demonstrates what the real issue is: not that aspects of the game's basic rules are altered, but that they're altered and those alterations become the default from then on. The 3.5 Core Rules replaced the 3.0 Core Rules, and "3.75" (i.e. Pathfinder 1E) replaced 3.5 for all intents and purposes (even if it was technically not the same thing, being a different game from a different company). So by that token, the various "Option" books aren't any sort of upgrade to the core AD&D 2nd Edition game; they're a series of fairly sweeping optional rules, no more and no less.

The first of which we'll look at now: Player's Option: Combat & Tactics.

For me, this book is the aperitif of the Option line, presenting a modest offering before the series would start going hog-wild with wildly different forms of magic, expansive new high-level rules, and even rearranging how characters were built under the game rules. This book, by contrast, with its various options for running combat, was by far the tamest of the series. Given that it was also the first one, I'm left wondering if it was supposed to serve as the lead-in to the larger changes, or if it was simply seen as obligatory.

That last idea, that this book had a sense of "let's get this out of the way" is almost certainly my own bias, but I can't help the impression - and I suspect I had this same reaction back when I first pick this up (I distinctly recall that, even back then, I got this mostly to complete the set) - given that some of what's here is retread ground. Weapon groups and specializing in weapons? We got that back in PHBR1 The Complete Fighter's Handbook. An expanded unarmed combat system? PHBR15 The Complete Ninja's Handbook came out at almost the exact same time as this book. Heck, I even mentioned both of those things when I covered those books back in my leatherettes retrospective.

It doesn't help that some of the book's content that are technically new retread old ground. The mass combat rules here aren't those of the Battlesystem Miniatures Rules, Battlesystem Skirmishes, or even the alternative rules from DMGR2 The Castle Guide; while I can appreciate this book being a one-stop shop for all things combat-related, and doing so without referring to another book, I can't help but think that this particular wheel didn't need to be reinvented over and over again. Don't you think so, Birthright Campaign Setting?

All facetiousness aside, there is a lot of new content here, although looking back on it now, a lot of it doesn't feel new. In this case, however, I'm aware that time has colored my perceptions: things like a +1 bonus when attacking from higher ground (hello there, General Kenobi!), attacks of opportunity, disarming enemies, etc. all make me think of D&D 3rd Edition. While this book was written well over a year before TSR would be bought out by WotC, and so can't really be said to have been floating ideas for what would make it into 3E, it's clear to me (particularly in light of having recently finished 30 Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons & Dragons, which talks about the 3E design process) that this book was very much on the minds of WotC's design team when it came time to revamp the game.

Rather oddly, one point that sticks out to me now is how there's one place where this book did include some stealth-errata: it allowed characters from the warrior class group (i.e. fighters, rangers, and paladins) who received bonus non-weapon proficiency slots from high Intelligence to spend those on weapon proficiencies, which reversed what PHBR1 The Complete Fighter's Handbook said on the subject.

Likewise, while this book goes out of its way to highlight that these rules are optional, and in many cases modular, one of the most notable changes it introduces is also one of the more subtle: it redefines the use of "rounds" as a unit of time, now calling it a "combat round." The difference being that a "round" is one minute, whereas a "combat round" is said to be between ten to fifteen seconds (though it explicitly says that five combat rounds make up one round, suggesting that they're actually twelve seconds long). 3rd Edition would shrink this down further, making rounds a six-second unit of time.

Also, I rolled my eyes a little at the period-based weapon listings later in the book. I mean, I get that if you want your game to reflect a different genre, then tailoring equipment lists is one of the ways to do that; as this book notes, it'd feel weird if a samurai fought with a pilum (though if you want your game world to have a culture that's not just a historical pastiche, liberally mixing particular elements seems like a fun way to go about doing so, at least to me). But the divisions in chapter seven feel a little too narrow to me: did we really need lists of appropriate weapons for the Dark Ages, Crusades, Hundred Years' War, and Renaissance?

Overall, I understand what this book was trying to do; the fighter (and its cousin classes) can be very boring in AD&D 2nd Edition. Heck, the mainline Core Rules don't even allow for critical hits! But while I won't say that this book is bad, the solutions it presents feel overwrought; we get pages and pages of critical hit tables for the body locations of humans, animals, monsters, all with variations depending on the type of damage dealt (i.e. slashing, piercing, or bludgeoning). It's like bringing in the Army Corps of Engineers to replace a flat tire.

Looking back now, the impression I have is that the majority of what this book offered was too much work to bring into your game, at least if you wanted to introduce anything more than a couple of small changes. The reward simply doesn't seem worth the payoff in terms of making everyone at the table relearn/remember various tweaks and tidbits. It's entirely possible that I'm misjudging this, of course, but given how prosaic many of these options are (a casualty, I suspect, of focusing so firmly on the non-magical aspects of a high fantasy world), I've never been able to get excited about what's here, neither when I first read this book nor now.

The bottom line is that the strategy involved in Combat & Tactics works, but comes across as a Pyrrhic victory.

Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.

 

[Voadam]

I didn't pick this one up. I was fairly happy with AD&D combat including the different weapon style options from the 2e Complete Fighter's Handbook and the martial arts from 1e Oriental Adventures if the 2e PH martial arts were not enough.

I got the sense Combat and Tactics provided an option for D&D to be more like GURPS or Rolemaster and I did not like the very in-depth facing and second by second action options or the more realistic stun and fatigue type rules of GURPS. I really liked fast resolution D&D combat rounds with everybody getting an attack that kept the engaged pace I preferred for the feel of mythic cinematic Conan comics style combat. Even Palladium being mostly D&D but adding in an opposed roll for parries or dodges was noticeable as a speed bump for combat pacing in my home group.

Mayfair Games Role Aids AD&D line came up with a similar Combat boxed set that I did not pick up, though I grabbed a bunch of their other stuff like their Arch-Magic boxed set.

 

[Orius]

I'm definitely in agreement with you that Player's Option is NOT a 2.5. This is complicated a bit by a comment Zeb Cook made in Dragon IIRC about the game possibly receiving incremental updates like software and even speculated on a 2.5 being done in the future. But PO was not that 2.5. Like you said, it didn't upgrade the core rules that much unless you're counting some of the errata from Spells and Magic, and it was all optional stuff. The rules it updated themselves were also pretty much all optional as well. Now an argument can be made for UA being a 1.5 as that book was considered official and it did update a few things, but it wasn't to the extent of 3.5's changes.

Player's Option also came 6 years into 2e's life. Early 2e was influenced by a need to stay compatible with 1e as much as possible. By 1995, that was less important, 2e was now 6 years old, and the D&D game was effectively good as dead commercially. While TSR supposedly wasn't interested in working on 3e at the time, the game probably did need to be shored up in certain spots.

Anyway, Combat and Tactics is a decent book IMO. I prefer defaulting to it rather than the Fighter's Handbook myself. Generally one aim to the Player's Option books might have been to compile and revise the various optional rules from the splats. In any case, I tend to give the books precedence in my 2e games because it's easier than dealing with a multitude of splats.

The combat system does look like an early prototype for 3e, a good part of it but not all got ported over. The martial arts rules are kind of a mess, but I do use the section on weapon mastery. The critical hits chapter is okay, but a bit too cumbersome, and I don't think 2e is really built to handle crits anyway.

The equipment chapter is one of the best parts the book IMO. Sure, I don't need weapons broken down by era as much as was done, but it's probably the most comprehensive weapon and armor list in 2e. There's a good variety of weapons, though some might be a bit too specialized, there's cultural based tables for Middle Eastern and Far Eastern based cultures, though the Asian themed table tends to skew heavily towards Japanese stuff as usual. And there's an optional selection of primitive firearms if the DM cares to use them. They're a bit too overspecialized IMO, but the book at least gives DMs some good options. Finally, the armor section details some types of armor that were historically prevalent but sometimes overlooked by D&D because they weren't used much in the West. And the partial armor rules have their uses in building armor combinations such as were used by Greek hoplites. The whole section doesn't just give players new goodies, but provides the DM with world building tools.

The mass combat and siege rules are okay I guess. At this point Battlesystem had flopped and was OOP anyway. I suppose it could have been integrated into Birthright, but TSR just didn't do that.

Anyway, C&T is a book that usually finds its way to my 2e table.

 

[Alzrius]

I really liked fast resolution D&D combat rounds with everybody getting an attack that kept the engaged pace I preferred for the feel of mythic cinematic Conan comics style combat.

That's along the lines of what I was trying to say in my overview, when I referred to the options the book presented as being "overwrought."

The whole idea of "it's boring for the fighter to just plant their feet and trade attacks with an enemy until one or the other of them drops," is one I'm sympathetic to, but I'm starting to wonder if it's one of those things that exists as an idea more than a reality. My personal experience is that most people who play melee-oriented characters know that ahead of time, and are fine with it (so long as they're effective, i.e. dealing out major damage). The players who'd find that boring tend to simply go for different classes.

 

[Alzrius]

And now we come to the book that everyone holds up as the epitome of the "Option" line: Player's Option: Skills & Powers. More so than any other title in this particular series, this book introduces changes and options that go to the very heart of the game. Strap yourselves in folks, this is going to be a wild ride.

But before we go into what's here, I feel the need to issue some disclaimers with regard to this particular retrospective:

First, I'm extremely suspicious (or "sus," as the young people call it) about the PDF copy of this that's for sale on DriveThruRPG. Specifically, I think it's a scan of the first printing of the book, which didn't incorporate the errata that the second printing did. Now, while the sales page notes that the file was updated some months after being initially released, there's a comment that postdates that update by several years indicating that the file is of the first printing. Likewise, the very first point of errata (which is that the last line of the credits should be "Special Thanks: Brad Bolas") is not reflected in the storefront's preview file.

I can't say for certain that the copy that's for sale now is the first printing, because I haven't bought the PDF they're selling. But if it is, that's rather inexcusable, to my mind. I mean, forget the issue of why they went with the first printing to begin with for their scan; the AD&D 2nd Edition Core Rules CR-ROM 2.0 uses the second printing of the book (I made sure to check), so why couldn't they do the same here? It's honestly disappointing.

Second, I'm going to try to keep this confined to the book itself, rather than spinning off into various issues regarding "what makes D&D what it is?" When you get into issues that alter core (and Core) aspects of the game, it's easy to start getting metaphysical with regard to identity (in this case, of the game, rather than a person), and while both interesting and worthwhile, that's not what I'm trying to cover here. I will say that there's a good bit of this in Jon Peterson's excellent book The Elusive Shift though, which - like everything Peterson writes - is a brilliant look back at tabletop RPGs in general and D&D in particular (except for Heroes' Feast; I'm sorry Jon, I adore your work, but lending your name to a cookbook? It's hard to see that as being anything except a quick cash-grab).

So with all of that said, let's take a closer look at S&P itself.

What everyone most remembers about this is the point-buy method of building characters (mostly with regard to classes, though it used this almost everywhere else as well), with sub-ability scores being the second most notable part of it. But there's actually quite a bit more here, ranging from the new take on psionics (also present in the Dark Sun Campaign Setting (Expanded and Revised Edition)) to alternative methods of ability score generation (among which are also point-buy options of establishing ability scores, in what I think is a first for D&D).

Insofar as the sub-ability scores go...I feel like I want to like them more than I do. I mean, the idea behind them isn't without merit, it's just that once you consider the underlying philosophy long enough, you start to realize how arbitrary the entire breakdown is. Are twelve ability scores really better than six? Why not just have three (e.g. Physique, Deftness, and Discipline). The major issue then becomes why make the change if the results ultimately yield the same thing? To me, the most salient reason not to do this is familiarity/tradition, though I'll admit that excuse won't work for me in certain later sections...

There's a bit of a head-scratcher for me in the racial breakdown. I don't just mean that they reintroduced the half-orc as one of the "standard" races, or even that they also slipped the half-ogre in there alongside them (the first and only time that particular race has been put upfront as one of the default options). Rather, it's the inclusion of almost all of the alternative races (with the saurials notably missing) from PHBR10 The Complete Book of Humanoids.

Now, maybe I shouldn't have called it a "head-scratcher," since that implies I don't understand why they put these here, and I do. It's for the same reason the psionics rules this book introduced were reprinted in the aforementioned Dark Sun boxed set; nobody likes having to buy multiple books just to get everything you need to play. To that extent, reiterating things from other books saves consumers the extra charge, and saves people who like physical books from having to haul multiple volumes around. But at the same time, this still feels somewhat unnecessary; in a book about alternative rules, you'd think there'd be more of a focus on new options rather than aggregating what's appeared elsewhere.

Which is when I realized, re-reading this, just how much that S&P really wanted to be a one-stop shop with regard to major alternative rules (for lack of a better term). Viewed from that angle, it's no surprise that this book collects material from other books almost as much as it invents new stuff. Races, kits, nonweapon proficiencies, weapon specialization; a lot of what's here are the "greatest hits" of AD&D 2nd Edition's variant rules.

Now, that's not entirely fair; the book does put its own spin on a lot of what's here. The kits, for instance, have social ranks embedded in them now, and nonweapon proficiencies are presented alongside "traits" which subsume things such as Ambidexterty which were formerly NWPs, to name just a few of the smaller changes. So if nothing else, the book doesn't stop innovating, even when its retreading familiar ground.

And then we come to the actual building of characters via Character Points.

I'm going to digress for a moment in favor of a personal anecdote. "Bards on the Run" was a recurring but infrequent article in Dragon magazine back during the AD&D 2E days. Presenting gaming parodies of popular songs, I found it funny (much in the same way I find dad jokes funny now), and certain bits of pieces of those parodies have stuck with me over the years. One of which still reminds me of S&P. Specifically, when they presented the lyrics for "Can't Cast This Healin'" in issue #238, which had the following for the chorus:

'Cause I can't cast this healin' any more.
I've forgotten what we're down here fighting for.
And if I have to call upon Great Thor
And cast dimension door*
Then I won't be here for healing anymore.
Oooooooo . . .

Notice that asterisk (*) there? That indicated a footnote at the bottom of the page which read "Yes, we know that clerics can't cast dimension door, but word of recall doesn't rhyme." I distinctly recall saying to myself "well, a cleric would be able to cast dimension door if they took the 'wizardly priests' option on page 57 of Skills & Powers." Looking back now, all I can think is that my younger self was nuts...dual-classing or multiclassing would have been the better option!

All joking aside, this part of the book is, without question, the furthest that D&D has ever strayed from its use of character classes as a central pillar of game design. What's interesting to consider is - compared to certain other RPGs which use point-buy attributes for building PCs - the relatively conservative stance that this book takes. While it's not too surprising that levels remain intact, character classes are still here also. Instead, what you're buying are what we'd now call "class features" (though racial abilities are also purchased with Character Points, aka CPs, as well, along with NWPs and certain other aspects of a character), which are strongly segregated; your fighter can't buy thief class features unless they actually take levels as a thief, for instance. Moreover, the strictly-defined nature of each purchasable ability means that these lists are fairly restrictive in what they offer...it's no surprise that there were quite a few articles in Dragon magazine following this book's release that presented CP lists for Planescape (#235), Ravenloft (#264), Dark Sun (Annual #1), among several others.

That said, I still loved this; compared to the level of customization available at the time, this was way beyond anything that mere kits offered. I mean, giving your fighter magic resistance? Entirely new thief skills? Letting divine spellcasters pick their spheres a la carte? The possibilities blew my mind.

I can't quite say the same for the new wizard specializations that the book offered. Don't get me wrong, the option to be a shadow mage was cool simply for the name alone, and the song wizard always made me think of the Forgotten Realms' Danilo Thann, but the entire idea of alchemy never really grabbed me as much as it apparently did a lot of people. Likewise, the geometer (as in, uses geometry magic) seemed like an interesting niche, but left me wondering how much that really justified its existence. It would take until Spells & Magic came out for the "Option" series to really kick its spellcasting options into high gear.

Lastly are the psionics. I've talked about my love for psionics before, and that was still true here, but I recall being less than enthused at having to relearn the entire system. Which wasn't to say that I disapproved of what was here; busting six disciplines down to five, making the various attack and defense modes (and the contact power) into proficiencies instead of powers unto themselves, having a MTHAC0 and MAC (where the "M" stands for "mental"), were all changes which I approved of. I just didn't like having to learn an entirely new system in order to do what was basically what I'd already been doing. But hey, this seemed like an overall upgrade in power for psionicists, so being an up-and-coming young powergamer, I liked them.

Of course, at the time I somehow overlooked that the various new rules for psionics didn't integrate with the rest of the book (i.e. buying them with Character Points, sub-ability score listings, etc.), all of which were absent here. In hindsight, it's easy to see why; it made the copy-paste over to Dark Sun much easier, no doubt. But it shouldn't be surprising that there ended up being a Sage Advice column in Dragon #231.

Overall, I have fond memories of S&P, mostly because I enjoyed having more possibilities at my fingertips. While I don't recall ever getting to actually use any of these, the potential alone was enough to excite my imagination. While it's tempting to look at its flaws and limitations now, within the context of AD&D 2nd Edition it still represents a huge departure from the norm, one that presents quite a few innovations (even if virtually none of them were ever seen again in D&D's future history). It's not a purchase I regret, and as much as people like to talk about its excesses and issues, I still wish I had a chance to run a game with it back in the day.

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[billd91]

Skills and Powers was the only PO book I bought and it completely put me off the line. We tried the sub-abilities, but they were terrible on balance. The point-buy aspect of the races was pointless in the sense that they did nothing to better-balance the races, which were pretty badly balanced at this point, they just offered minor adjustments.
I thought it was simply awful.

 

[Voadam]

I thought the split stat option offered a great option to deal with the imbalances of AD&D's stat generation and their reverse bell curve modifier mechanical importance of stats.

I adopted it but put the 18 cap back on strength.

The end result is that essentially all fighters got an 18 strength on attacks and damages instead of some fighters in the party and some just being unlucky and the character permanently behind the curve on fighter melee fighting.

 

[Orius]

Ah yes, Skills & Powers. What a mess. It's not a can of worms, it's a 55 gallon drum of undead purple worms.

It was a bold experiment, but a lot of stuff was broken and imbalanced, and it didn't integrate well as well as it should have with Combat & Tactics.

Subabilities were a mistake. Too many of them could be minmaxed in broken ways. Strength was the most infamous with one subability that only boosted encumbrance while the other boosted attack rolls and damage. Guess where players dumped there. Intelligence was another one where one subability gave extra CP for proficiencies while the other only affected wizard spell use. If you weren't a wizard, naturally you boosted the proficiencies. And in return, all the subabilities added were more complexity which wasn't worth it.

The point-based character building system was broken unless the DM put a good deal of oversight into it. While it could be used to build some good custom classes, there was a lot that could be exploited as well. Racial builds maybe were broken too. The flaws in the NWP chapter are also trouble, since they can be exploited for extra CP while not giving much of a disadvantage to a PC (biggest offender is Color Blindness, which might as well have been called "One Free Proficiency" since D&D doesn't have any sort of penalties for being color blind).

So give this book to minmaxers and you get a bunch of hulking color blind dudes who can't carry anything, but hit like Mack trucks, are skilled out the ass but aren't good at learning and have some sickly tricked out class abilities. Okay maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but Skills & Powers can really be abused.

The wizard specialties weren't bad, it's just that Spells & Magic expanded on them in more detail.

The psionics system wasn't bad, it's just that it was designed for the revised Dark Sun box, and wasn't integrated into the PO material. Worse, the system is broken as written, because the psionic attacks are likely to make the psionicist using the attacks lose more PSPs than his opponent. There was errata to fix that problem later on though, but it definitely smacks of a lack of playtesting. It's a shame because the system is a bit smoother than the Psionics Handbook rules.

The book isn't all bad. The NWP rules are much better than the core rules in the PHB. The kits are pretty good and more tightly integrated into proficiencies. It's just that there's a lot of broken material that's highly exploitable.

 

[Voadam]

I do remember issues with how many points priests got so that the ultimate x was actually usually a priest specialized in x even if x was a warrior, mage, or rogue concept.

 

[Orius]

That was the beta of CoDzilla.