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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Orius" data-source="post: 8530609" data-attributes="member: 8863">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.</blockquote>

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