AD&D 2E Edition Experience - Did/Do you Play AD&D 2E? How Was/Is It?

[cbwjm]

Some people are dyslexic but still want to play D&D and RPGs.

Yeah, but the people I'm playing with aren't. To be fair, sometimes it's just due to how late it is; 4 hours into a game and I suck at maths.

 

[delericho]

2nd Ed is one of four versions of the game I've played really extensively (with BECMI, 3e, and 5e being the others). In terms of hours of play, it's probably second only to 3e. (In terms of years, it's third - 3e still has the crown, with 5e second.)

I had a hell of a lot of fun with that edition! That was the edition where almost all of my formative RPG experiences took place, it was the edition that used for the first of my "great" campaigns (there are four campaigns I count as my very best RPG experiences over the years - one in 2nd Ed, one Vampire, and two 3.x). And so many other games, too, with so many friends.

But... I wouldn't return to the edition now. It's not that I consider the mechanics bad, per se, but there's enough in there that would just bug the hell out of me - these days, if/when I return to D&D it will be 5e or one of the near-clones (not that those don't have their own rough edges!)

In terms of products, I find myself bitterly regretting some of my purchasing choices: I invested heavily in "rules" books (the "Complete X" series, the "Players Option" series), and in the settings in a very wide but very shallow manner - in retrospect, I wish I'd instead invested deeply in one or two favourite settings (okay, three - Spelljammer, Dark Sun, and Ravenloft, in that order) plus the "Historical" series. Looking back, those settings are the real legacy of 2nd edition (not just the three I named - the others too).

 

[TGryph]

Played it from the day it came out til the day third Edition came out after I moved from my long term group. In my 40+ gaming years, it is the system I played the longest.

 

[VHawkwinter]

I played a couple sessions, and I've read the rulebooks. I thought it was okay but not great. It had some stuff I liked better though, mostly some differences in spellcasting that show up in houserule documents like "3.Y" like bringing back slow spell prep. Maybe also raising the difficulty of concentration checks.

I basically grew up on my dad's SSI AD&D videogames in the 90s though. I played a ton of Dungeon Hack. And he got me the DC AD&AD comics about Kyriani Agrivar from my grandparents book store. I remember liking those a lot as a kid. But I've been using 2e books (adventure and setting) with my other editions going back to 3.0. One of my bigger gaming product regrets is my Waterdeep Boxed set either getting lost or stolen, and it's one of the ones they never brought back PoD.

 

[JamesLFlowers]

Played 2e extensively during high school and college. Always felt that 2e was one of the heydays of D&D with new settings, game world expanding, etc. Unlike a lot of people, I loved THAC0 and always found it an easy way to calculate hits and misses in combat.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

And he got me the DC AD&AD comics about Kyriani Agrivar from my grandparents book store.

Haven't heard that name in forever and a day!

Priam Agrivar kinda was an eye-opener as to how a paladin should act. Gone was the rigid, unbending crusader. Here was someone that was fallible but driven to do good. More concerned with living up to his own code himself than trying to force his code on his companions and the world.

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

I responded to the poll back when but didn't post a comment. So now I'll post that I found 2e to be a modest advance over AD&D 1e, and that at the time I saw the "Complete Whatever" spatbooks as muchkin-bait but in retrospect not that bad. But when 3e came out I immediately adopted it as my very much preferred version of D&D (although not my favorite preferred TTRPG). Likewise when 3.5e came out. But when Pathfinder, 4e, 5e etc came out I didn't move on to them - my take was (and is) that 3.5e is Peak D&D.

(I'll mine Pathfinder 1e for ideas - or discover that I independently came up with some of the changes it made to D&D 3.5e - but I'm unwilling to adopt it wholesale.)

 

[Ron]

I’ve had a great time playing it, although I haven’t run many games with it. There was some controversy about the removal of demons, half-orcs, and assassins, but it didn’t bother me much. Demons were renamed, I never liked half-orcs, and assassins were a weak class. Most of the changes resulted in a cleaner version of AD&D. Some of Gygax’s passages, like initiative, were impossible to understand, while AD&D 2 was actually well-written as rules. Despite that, I felt it was too similar to AD&D. There were many issues that could have been addressed to maintain compatibility.