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

[Brendan Byrd]

First character I ever played was in a 2e Mystara game running Wrath of the Immortals (WotI).
I think it took us about three years real-time to finish that, and then the campaign continued on for another couple years.
I look back now with some amusement that my 2nd(?) level character got handed an artifact weapon due to WotI.
(It's not Monte Haul...it's just the end of the world as the characters know it. A 1d10+1 quarterstaff outta help out here. ) As a D&D newbie, I was clueless.

 

[The Soloist]

First character I ever played was in a 2e Mystara game running WotI.
I think it took us about three years real-time to finish that, and then the campaign continued on for another couple years.
I look back now with some amusement that my 2nd(?) level character got handed an artifact weapon due to WotI.
(It's not Monte Haul...it's just the end of the world as the characters know it. A 1d10+1 quarterstaff outta help out here. ) As a D&D newbie, I was clueless.

What is Wotl?

 

[Mannahnin]

P.S. THAC0, unfortunately, was a crime against humanity and should be stricken from the historical record.

How so? When I got 2E I found THAC0 a welcome rationalization and convenience compared to the combat matrices I learned on from BECMI and 1E.

I do think descending AC in general is counter-intuitive, though the Target 20 variation makes it simpler and more straightforward, especially if you just give Fighters a straight +1 to hit per level (as was the original idea, before they changed the formula to a table in the 1974 published rules) and other classes a ratio thereof.

Nowadays I find it ruefully humorous how D&D's combat rules were made and then kept harder to understand because they were trying to appeal to existing customers over new ones. First by changing the simple playtest formula of "20 - AC is your target, add Fighter level to your roll" to matrices/tables like wargamers would expect to see, then truncating those tables into "chunks" where advancement is slowed to only every few levels, purely to save page space! And then again when AD&D 1E was published, choosing to stick with descending AC for reasons of familiarity to existing players (see DMG p.164 where Gygax mentions this). And then of course 2E kept descending AC for the same reason of continuity/familiarity/reverse compatibility. It amazes me to realize that we could/should have had ascending AC more than 20 years earlier, but didn't from conservatism/fear of alienating existing customers.

 

[Brendan Byrd]

What is Wotl?

Wrath of the Immortals.
I'll go edit my post for clarity.

 

[The Soloist]

And then of course 2E kept descending AC for the same reason of continuity/familiarity/reverse compatibility. It amazes me to realize that we could/should have had ascending AC more than 20 years earlier, but didn't from conservatism/fear of alienating existing customers.

Correct. We know ascending AC is in Gamma World 4e in 1992. Which surely means it was on the table when 2e was created just a few years earlier. Ascending AC was well received at the time.

 

[Basic Expert]

I played 2e from '88 to '92 or so, then very rarely thereafter. I played 1e for a few years previously and found 2e much improved but not improved enough. I was disappointed that there wasn't ascending AC, better skill system, or more useful saving throw system. I was really looking for 3e, though I ended up being disappointed in that when it came out.

If memory serves, and it probably doesn't, we were using THAC0 in our 1e games so having it as the official system made sense. It's easy enough to get your head around after a little practice but, even then, we knew it was a hack to improve clunky 70s-era design while keeping backwards compatibility.

The more I played 2e the more boring and bland I found it. It doesn't have a hint of the Gygaxian pulp or baroque sub-system craziness of earlier editions: you, know the stuff that we could never wrap our heads around. I, for one, missed it when it was gone.

In the end, the utility wasn't there and the flavor wasn't there. I started playing non-D&D games as primary with only dipping into D&D on occasion ever since.

 

[The Soloist]

The more I played 2e the more boring and bland I found it. It doesn't have a hint of the Gygaxian pulp or baroque sub-system craziness of earlier editions: you, know the stuff that we could never wrap our heads around. I, for one, missed it when it was gone.

In the end, the utility wasn't there and the flavor wasn't there. I started playing non-D&D games as primary with only dipping into D&D on occasion ever since.

2e, without any of the optional rules, is 1e but rewritten to be understandable. The utility is very much there.

We played an near medieval 1e campaign, without any gonzo-weird. Conversely, I GMed a gonzo-wierd campaign using the 2e rules.

If your GM or you as the GM didn't inject gonzo-wierd in 1e, it wasn't there.