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

[Tallifer]

I distinctly remember that the 2E Bard was truly hosed. Some of his songs took 5 minutes to cast before any effect happened. Which is fine if your dungeon master does not start every combat with, "Roll initiative. You didn't see them."

 

[Hussar]

I remember liking 2e so much that I actually held out switching to 3e for about 2 years. Then I bought 3e and BAM 3.5 came out. Grrr. That was the end of my gaming purchasing largely. I went from buying several books a year to maybe buying one book, and most of them were d20, not WOtC, a year for the duration of 3e.

One thing that struck me in the change from 2e to 3e was the ability to actually rely on the rules, rather than knowing that the rules were garbage and I was always going to have to make house rules to spackle over the holes in the 2e ruleset. I went from a binder of house rules in 2e to a page in 3e.

 

[DammitVictor]

One thing that struck me in the change from 2e to 3e was the ability to actually rely on the rules, rather than knowing that the rules were garbage and I was always going to have to make house rules to spackle over the holes in the 2e ruleset. I went from a binder of house rules in 2e to a page in 3e.

I had way more house rules for 3e. I generally agree with your complaint about the ramshackle nature of the 2e rules... but trying to fix anything in 3e means having to fix everything else that depended on the rule you're trying to fix. Plus I'm a hamfisted idiot when it comes to game design, always trying to put the baroque in broken.

Whereas I replace all of the class and multiclass options for every nonhuman race in AD&D and still probably couldn't get away with charging $10 for it unless I included all of the Complete Humanoids Handbook.

 

[Hussar]

I just found that in 3e, house rules were far more problematic than not. Usually, you'd see someone trying to "fix" a problem with a house rule and it turned out, more often than not, that the person didn't actually know the actual rule in the first place. So, the fix was generally worse than the problem. And then you'd see all sorts of "Oh, 3e is borken" type threads on various forums, when, in reality, the problem was far more often user error.

We ran 3e almost entirely by the book. Heck, trying to get my players to use stuff that wasn't WotC sanctioned was always a challenge. I loved using d20 stuff, but, my players would very rarely stray from official books.

 

[Mark Hope]

I'm running it now and loving it. I started with B/X back in 82, moved to AD&D1e, transitioned to 2e and played it until a couple of years into 3e's run. I did play 3e for a while, but went back to 2e. It's just such a great, solid system at its core. I've accumulated a fair amount of houserules over the years but the basic system really sings. I like its asymmetry, its differentiated systems, its flexibility. I love the campaign settings (Dark Sun is just the best, and Ravenloft, Spelljammer, and Planescape are works of wild imagination). I like how it encourages you to add your own elements and doesn't fall apart if you hack at it. It's very robust and flexible like that. I'd happily play any of the TSR editions, but 2e is the one I play the most.

 

[Gladius Legis]

I found the Player's Option books to be questionable myself. Sometimes changing the game way too much for my tastes, I was always a core kind of guy.

I hated Skills and Powers and wasn't terribly fond of Spells and Magic. But I loved Combat and Tactics, that was the one Player's Option book that I felt kept the core largely intact while expanding on it in a brilliant way.

2e with C&T and the Complete class books was my favorite edition until 5e came along.

 

[Badvoc]

I have fond memories of 2e - it and 1e were the editions that I played the most. Some of the rules were quite janky but there were some glorious supplements published.

 

[David Howery]

I was roughly in the middle of my gaming years when 2E came out, and there were some things I wanted to see done that weren't. I wanted an end to level limits for non-humans (or at least more generous ones), a revamping but still included barbarian and cavalier, and most of all, a complete reworking of 1E's wonky 'it runs backwards' AC system. Sure, THACO was easy enough, but the whole 'a +2 to AC actually means you subtract 2' thing always annoyed me, and I always thought there had to be a better way. The fix to AC in 3E and later editions was about the only thing I liked about them...

 

[CleverNickName]

This survey is only a couple weeks old, and it hasn't gotten nearly as much attention as AD&D 1E. Strange.

I remember that AD&D 2E was a juggernaut back in the day, with tons of new campaign settings (Dark Sun, Spelljammer, Planescape...) and some of the most popular adventure modules. I thought that more people would have at least tried it, even if they didn't particularly care for it.

(Or maybe my memory is just skewed. I wanted to keep playing BECMI, and I would get so excited every time I heard someone talking about a new D&D book....only to discover they were talking about "Advanced" and I didn't have the right books to play it.) New D&D books were hard to come by for a teenager living in Oklahoma during the late 80s....

I always thought that Spelljammer was too campy and silly for me (giant space hamsters, really? Squids in space, really?) I really wanted to play Dark Sun...the story was so friggin' cool, and I was really into post-apocalyptic sci-fi at the time. And years later, after my first stint at university, I picked up Planescape: Torment on PC and really enjoyed it.

 

[atanakar]

This survey is only a couple weeks old, and it hasn't gotten nearly as much attention as AD&D 1E. Strange.

I remember that AD&D 2E was a juggernaut back in the day, with tons of new campaign settings (Dark Sun, Spelljammer, Planescape...) and some of the most popular adventure modules. I thought that more people would have at least tried it, even if they didn't particularly care for it.

Played it and remember liking it ranking:

• AD&D : 108
• 3e : 84
• AD&D2e : 82
• BECMI : 50
• Basic Holmes : 39
• OD&D : 31
• BX : 27

AD&D2e was indeed the height of the popularity for the game but I suspect that most tried it because it was in vogue at the time. This would not be reflected on forums today because the larger player base was soft.

AD&D1e on the other hand has a hard core following. These players are older (50+) have more free time and are all over forums.

EnWorld represents only a microcosm of the total number of D&D players. If you ask the same question on Dragonsfoot (AD&D) or on the Piazza (BECMI) forums you will get very different results.