The people I played with when 2E came out switched quite happily, but as I recall we didn't have any long-running 1E campaigns at the time. I recall thinking that 2E was a much-needed streamlining of the 1E rules, but sufficiently close to 1E that we could still use the old resources. We didn't miss the monk or assassin classes at all, particularly when the splatbooks came out. So we were generally happy with 2E.
At the same time, however, we were starting to play a bunch of different games, and we ended up playing a lot of Rolemaster, mainly because Rolemaster was a better system for mid-to-high powered gaming than 2E. But for the most part I was getting turned off D&D from the early 90's: I wanted a much more self-consistent, less ad-hoc rules system for my games, and the "patched-up 1E" feel of 2E was unsatisfying in that regard, even if I still had lots of fun playing it.
And then I moved from Sydney to LA and pretty much stopped gaming after a year or two (except for occasional "special guest appearances" in my younger brother's long-running 2E campaign when I went home for holidays), so I pretty much missed the whole skills and powers phase of 2E.
I only got back into gaming after I got married in 2000 and my wife wanted to play. We found a group where we played some GURPS, a few games of horrendously mangled 1E/2E/skills and powers combinations before 3E came out. I remember when one of the players in the group got the 3E PHB we were extremely sceptical: on the surface it looked like it was stepping back to some of the mistakes of 1E and it was very different, but it did have some features we liked (like one XP table for all classes). But it wasn't at all clear to us what advantages it had over (say) GURPS.
Then we played our first game of 3E as an experiment (most notable perhaps in that the group had something like 5 monks in it out of about 10 players), and we never looked back. In fact the consensus amongst the more experienced role-players in the group was that there was no need or desire to ever play 2E again.
Looking back, if there were no 3E, I'd probably be reasonably happy playing a fairly heavily house-ruled version of core 2E for a "simple" fantasy roleplaying game; with Rolemaster or GURPS for a more involved system. I have no desire other than pure nostalgia to want to play 1E. And the Basic/Expert/Masters/Immortal D&D system looks a lot more enticing in hindsight than it did as an AD&D player in the early 90's.
So, do I hate 2E? No. Was it an improvement over 1E? Yep. Do I ever want to play 1E or 2E again? Not really. Would I have fun if I did? Almost certainly.
Corran
). Eventually, converting 'Jammer to Basic D&D became less trouble than running it in a system I disliked, and that was the end of 2e for me.
