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

[The Crimson Binome]

The rules were clunky and unpolished, but the message was on point: This is a game about playing a role. While there will certainly be obstacles to overcome, the DM isn't your enemy; they're just doing their job, of portraying the world in a fair and realistic manner. Monster exist primarily within an ecology, and are part of how the world works. This isn't just a game, for you to win by getting the treasure. In fact, thinking of it as a game is entirely the wrong approach. The only thing you need to worry about, as a player, is portraying your own character.

 

[David Howery]

My whole gaming career was in 1E and 2E... 2E was a perfectly fine set of rules... with some tweaking. I was annoyed at some of the things cut from 1E, so I worked out having monks and barbarians into the game, left demons and devils and all the other fiends as is with no name changes, etc. One of the things I really liked about it was the way it went multicultural in a big way... 1E did have OA, but 2E added the counterparts of Mongols, Aztecs, and Arabia to the mix. 2E started to go off the rails late in it's life, with all those handbooks and supplements, but I was pretty much out of gaming by then...

 

[Reynard]

I started with BECMI and played it for a lot of years before discovering AD&D. We found 1E just months before the 2E release and immediately upgraded. 2E is still my favorite edition. If BECMI got me involved, 2E made me not only a lifelong fan but a lifelong DM. It was an utter joy to run, and one could easily bolt on subsystems from not only other editions of D&D but also whole other game systems. I would go back to running 2E in a heartbeat if I thought my modern players would do so. Instead I am constantly trying to find the 2E in the current edition (3.x, PF, 5E).

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

This is the one I played in college.
I joined a long-running campaign that had been going roughly nearly 20years when I signed on in ~1995. So in truth, what the DM ran at the table was really more like a massive tangle of houserules, with a healthy sprinkling of 2e mixed in.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

My 2e books are in poor shape. The Monstrous Compendium binder's pages are torn, with many being taped up (as an aside, when I was a kid, whenever I had to open and then close a three-ring binder, all I could think about was one of the prongs accidentally impaling the webbing of my hand). I'm not sure it's from use or just poor quality.

2e remains the edition I played the longest and the most. From 1989 to 1999. Early on, we had multiple campaigns running at once, multiple sessions during the week. By the end of that decade, time commitments were definitely less available and I was lucky to be able to run a dedicated campaign one summer.

I have a fondness for 2e. The rules are probably still branded into my head, and I keep thinking about running a short campaign of it again, much like I did with 1e some years ago.

The bindings of these books are crap, although the Monstrous Manual is still holding up.

 

[Myrhdraak]

I played it but did a lot of houserules to it. In the end it was a combination of D&D 2e, Runequest and the skillsystem from the James Bond RPG.

 

[shadowoflameth]

The short answer is that I've played all the editions at least a little and liked the older ones especially 2e but it was way more complex than the newer ones and that's, IMHO the biggest thing that's changed. You don't need a PHD in the rules to pay. With a math minor for doing Thac0. and it was a lot less forgiving at low levels. A wizard had one spell and a rogue had a 90% chance to fail on disarming a trap that would kill him the first time it happened.

 

[David Howery]

okay, maybe it's just me, but I always rather liked the danger of being a low level PC in 1E/2E... you had to be sneaky and thoughtful and really plan things out... and sometimes you just bit the dust through bad luck. Making it up to levels 4 and beyond was a real accomplishment...

 

[Reynard]

The short answer is that I've played all the editions at least a little and liked the older ones especially 2e but it was way more complex than the newer ones and that's, IMHO the biggest thing that's changed. You don't need a PHD in the rules to pay. With a math minor for doing Thac0. and it was a lot less forgiving at low levels. A wizard had one spell and a rogue had a 90% chance to fail on disarming a trap that would kill him the first time it happened.

I don't get it and likely never will. First of all, THAC0 is just subtraction. Second of all, there was a chart on the character sheet if, in fact, subtraction was that daunting.

 

[R_J_K75]

The bindings of these books are crap, although the Monstrous Manual is still holding up.

Both my sets, the original and updated 2E sets, all 3 books, fell apart and had to be cobble together with duct tape. Then again we used and abused them almost daily for 4-5 years straight.