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

[Shiroiken]

The early 2E game was okay. We waited a while to transition from 1E, and when we did we kept a lot of our favorite rules from 1E. The middle part of 2E was its golden age, when it pumped out some of the best campaign settings (which started its downfall, competing against itself). The late 2E was aweful, with the "Player's Option" books causing the end of several groups (and too many friendships). By the time 3E was announced, I was totally ready for it.

 

[R_J_K75]

The early 2E game was okay. We waited a while to transition from 1E, and when we did we kept a lot of our favorite rules from 1E. The middle part of 2E was its golden age, when it pumped out some of the best campaign settings (which started its downfall, competing against itself). The late 2E was aweful, with the "Player's Option" books causing the end of several groups (and too many friendships). By the time 3E was announced, I was totally ready for it.

Lets face it there was as much crap that came out of the 2E era as there was good. Some of the late 2E setting stuff was really good, quite a few overlooked gems, one that comes to mind is Ravenloft: Carnival. I cant say for sure but Id suspect that that edition produced the most products out of any, so it took some weeding through. By the time 3E was announced I was ready too for the simple fact that some of the character/class restrictions annoyed me and didnt make sense. Oddly though now I wish that they would bring some back as I think they went too far in the opposite direction giving the players too much leeway.

 

[Reynard]

The early 2E game was okay. We waited a while to transition from 1E, and when we did we kept a lot of our favorite rules from 1E. The middle part of 2E was its golden age, when it pumped out some of the best campaign settings (which started its downfall, competing against itself). The late 2E was aweful, with the "Player's Option" books causing the end of several groups (and too many friendships). By the time 3E was announced, I was totally ready for it.

Maybe one of the reasons I remember 2E so fondly is that I have never been a supplement person. I owned a few and would implement setting specific crunch like the Krynn moons, etc. But we never allowed our games to get inundated with that sort of thing until it became ubiquitous in 3rd Edition. Now in 5e I am thankful for very limited player facing crunch.

 

[Legatus Legionis]

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[atanakar]

Maybe one of the reasons I remember 2E so fondly is that I have never been a supplement person. I owned a few and would implement setting specific crunch like the Krynn moons, etc. But we never allowed our games to get inundated with that sort of thing until it became ubiquitous in 3rd Edition. Now in 5e I am thankful for very limited player facing crunch.

That was also my approach to.

 

[TwoSix]

Maybe one of the reasons I remember 2E so fondly is that I have never been a supplement person. I owned a few and would implement setting specific crunch like the Krynn moons, etc. But we never allowed our games to get inundated with that sort of thing until it became ubiquitous in 3rd Edition. Now in 5e I am thankful for very limited player facing crunch.

Heh. 2E was probably the reason I AM a supplement person. I've always been mechanically oriented, and I was building custom classes from the 2E DMG system before I actually played a game. And kits, at least the ones that had some real impact, were awesome.

 

[Reynard]

Heh. 2E was probably the reason I AM a supplement person. I've always been mechanically oriented, and I was building custom classes from the 2E DMG system before I actually played a game. And kits, at least the ones that had some real impact, were awesome.

Oh, I adored the class construction kit (even if they were mechanically inferior to the core classes). it was a very useful tool for creating just the right elements for a campaign alongside monsters and magic items. It's too bad following editions have not made as great an effort to include such a thing.

I don't dislike kits in theory. They really are essentially 5E's backgrounds, but like 3.x prestige classes, they very quickly got turned into abusable power creep toys. So we just didn't use many of them and it made the game better and more manageable.

 

[Azzy]

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

Weird, my first printing of both the PHB and DMG are still going strong despite the abuse.

The only 2e things that I had issues with were a couple of the Complete Guides—the covers detached (but the rest of it stayed together). Then there's the Monstrous Compendium... but that's a whole other story.

 

[cbwjm]

Played 2e quite a lot after moving on from basic and I loved it. Probably played it the most and would love to run a 2e game today.

People complain about thac0 but it is really quite easy. Subtract your roll + bonuses from your thac0 and that's the AC you hit.

ADnD is still my preferred method of multiclassing though I'd also be open to simplifying it similar to CnC.

I would probably drop the thief class and all related skills completely and make their skills NWPs instead, or maybe just make the NWP and assign them to the thief class.

Other than my dislike of thief skills I'd probably be happy to play it as is, of course no edition of DnD is without its houserules, I'd probably play with a few of them unless others I was playing with wanted to keep things by the book.

 

[Celebrim]

You don't really have an option that captures my experience.

I have both never played and at the same time have played 2e AD&D. That's because the groups I was in persisted in playing 1e AD&D, but treated 2e AD&D as a sort of supplemental rules set of optional rules that we could pick and choose from. So I'm pretty sure we ended up with 2e initiative rules and 2e surprise rules, or at least something very inspired by them. And we took other rules in as different DMs felt they were needed. But no one ever played anything that was exactly 2e AD&D, or at least not consciously.

Then again, no one ever played anything that was exactly 1e AD&D either, although that was a less conscious choice.