I've figured it out.

[Ridley's Cohort]

So now I'm flumoxxed. Where are all these people who decry 2e as the worst thing since the Bubonic plague? According to this, a majority of people who were playing at the time that 2nd edition came out, switched merrily!

As a practical matter 2e was indeed an improvement over 1e. It is just that 1e got a pass on a large number of weaknesses because of its heritage. I may be willing to cut Gygax some slack because AD&D was (one of) the first attempts at something so ambitious, but why should I do the same for some game designer in the circa 1990 when spending my hard earned money?

3e is the essentially game that 2e should have been. The gaming "technology" at the heart of 3e has existed since the mid-late 80s.

I personally found the 2e Options books to be atrocious.

 

[dead]

I played 1st edition for about 1 year and then 2nd edition came out.

I loved the 2nd edition! I founded it easier to use and the books were much more user-friendly.

The only down-side I noticed was that the sourcebooks and adventures they started to release were not hard-edge and serious like 1E material. Rather, they were "soft" and focused at the younger audience.

About 8 years later this changed when writers like Bruce Cordell and Monte Cook were brought on board.

As far as rules go, though, I thought the 2nd Edition was an improvement on 1st Edition!!!

Perhaps this is because I only had 1 year of gaming under 1E. (Before 1E I was playing Basic D&D for 3 years.)

 

[Turjan]

As for the results of the poll, I do find them interesting, because I am constantly hearing from people who love 1e, hated 2nd edition, quit gaming when it came out, and then didn't come back to gaming until 3e came out. I'm trying to understand that phenomenon. And according to this poll, such a phonomenon doesn't really exist.

Do the complaints not refer to all those late 2E supplements that did not fit together, because they were not balanced and completely over the top? Another strand of complaints regards mediocre adventures with lots of railroading and no substance. A third strand of complaints deals with countless settings that got spoilt by overbearing metaplots. All these points don't have anything to do with the situation during the switch from 1E to 2E.

 

[BOZ]

Huh? My 2nd ed PHB had fighters, rangers, paladins, clerics, druids, mages, 8 different specialist wizards, thieves and bards. Yours must have been defective.

i was a bit confused by that one myself.

 

[Scarbonac]

We played a 1e/2e hybrid game; things we liked from 1e we kept (most spells, some classes, the half-orc, etc) and delighted in the new that made sense to us (such as the Bard, frex) and we threw ourselves into the "splatbooks" (what a wretched term) with wild orgiastic abandon, again, snagging what we liked and ignoring the rest. Player's Option was a smorgasbord of ideas that we gorged at.

We rip those things from 3.x that we like (classes, weapon proficiency rules and skill system in particular) but refuse to use the retarded stuff (CR, ECL, LA, wealth by level) and continue to play in our long-running (20-year+) campaigns.

 

[megamania]

I started to play shortly after 2e came out. I bought but never used 1e books since I was told they were a better resource. I had fun with 2e regardless. Then Player Options came out and players played the same PC each time with a different name which was boring.
3e came out and through the better balancing management, players discovered other races and classes.

Change is good.

 

[woodelf]

Some of you may know this already, but I've been struggling with this. Reading all these threads about the various edition, I think I've finally come up with a reasonable theory as to why people tend to hate 2nd edition, but love 3rd edition.

Here's my hypothesis:

When 2nd edition came out, people were involved in their 1st edition games heavily, and having a grand old time. 2nd edition came out, and removed certain classes, and modified certain things which fundamentally changed the way people were playing their game. So, for example, if you were playing a monk when 2e came out, well, you got screwed, big time. People hated this, and they either did one of four things - quit playing the game altogether, , switched to a different system (rolemaster, runequest or something similar) or continued to just play 1st edition, or reluctantly switched. This last option seems to be the rarest of them all. Maybe I should post a poll to determine. In fact, better yet, I'll make this thread a poll.

Fast forward 12 years when 3rd edition comes out. Now, almost unanimously, people love this game. Why? Because those original campaigns aren't being run anymore. *Most* people don't have campaigns that span 12,13, 14+ years. So, people could start fresh with 3rd edition, and be ok with it. Plus - hey, it has the monk and barbarian, so it must be good. Ignoring the fact that 3rd edition is to 1st edition like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is to a hamburger.


This is my theory. Any thoughts?

Has no resemblance to any of my experiences, or those of people i knew. One group of about 4 college-age guys didn't switch. But 3 of the four of them were playing in my 2nd ed game at the same time. Every other group i knew switched, and happily. Most grandfathered existing characters; a few created all new characters, or wrapped up their existing campaign and then switched--but generally within a year or so. Personally, i switched as quickly as i could read the new books, more or less, and happily incorporated the Complete... books. So, that was a game with [quick mental math] 3 years of weekly, 8+hr, sessions, and at least half-a-dozen players and 3x as many characters, that got converted, and ran for 4.5 more years--2 of the characters even lasted from the very beginning to the very end.

I can't speak for others, of course, but from my POV, AD&D2 fixed a lot of my problems with AD&D1: the skill system, as broken as it is in hindsight, was awesome at the time; stripping the classes down to 4 (then 5) core classes, with variants on that base, was a great structure to work from; psionics were finally a proper part of the system, and fun to play and balanced; the spheres system for priests rocked; and the vastly-expanded monster entries, with lots of cool info on behavior/habitat/etc. was a godsend--it was like having a mini Ecology of... article for every single monster!

This is not to say that AD&D2 was a panacea. We still had houserules, but only a couple major ones, which were holdovers from AD&D1 (attack priority, wounds, and alignment were the big ones)--and which i'd have to implement in D&D3E, too, because they *still* haven't been fixed. And we had fewer houserules than with AD&D1, because AD&D2 addressed a couple of the "problem" areas. Also, we were never strictly AD&D2, in that monks and a couple of classes from Dragon (sentinel, scribe, others) were retained. But we kept the same characters, adjusting them to the new rules as they came out (so, frex, the psionic characters used AD&D1 psionics until The Complete Psionics Handbook came out). Also, to be clear, we only used the first 5 Complete... books (fighter, thief, cleric, wizard, psionics), because the dwarves book was blah, the elves book was totally broken, and so i don't think i even looked at any of the others after that (until i was playing in a game, a few years later, that used several others).

As for D&D3E: if i hadn't already stopped playing D&D, that would've driven me away. I played in a game for 2.5yrs, and the more familiar i got with the system, the more i found to dislike. It doesn't fix a single thing that i thought was broken enough to merit houserules for AD&D1/2, dumped some stuff i really loved (monster descriptions, frex), and generally moved in the opposite direction that the change from AD&D1 to AD&D2 did. And it's not the D20 System aspects that bug me--i love Spycraft, the only flaw with Arcana Unearthed is that combat is the same as D&D3E, and even Everquest D20 looks like it'd be fun to play. I really don't think the changes from AD&D1 to AD&D2 were significant enough to "fundamentally change the way people play"--but those from AD&D2 to D&D3E certainly were.

I think it's not that people--even the hypothetical vocal minority--hate AD&D2 more than AD&D1, it's just more recent, and had more supplements that people disliked. If anything, they hate that AD&D2 wasn't more dislike AD&D1--that it wasn't a bigger upgrade. At least, that's what i get from people i talk to in meatspace.

I'd venture to say that the reason 3E is loved and 2E is hated is that 3E has much better mechanics, *and* it gives the end user enough knowledge to know how to tinker with the system in a balanced fashion. If you will, 3E is "internally consistant." At least, far more so than 2E.

Yep, i'd say that's at least a significant part of it. Of course, while D&D3E is more internally consistent, for those of us that don't like the game it consistently supports, that's not much of a consolation. So i prefer AD&D2 because it gives me some support for the style of game i like--moreso than earlier or later iterations of D&D--even if it's a mish-mash of a game; while D&D3E is a very consistent game--consistently not the sort of game i want to play. Or, to put it another way, if you love chicken and can't stand beef, even a McDonald's McChicken sandwich is better than the best steak a 4-star restaurant can give you.

As to the topic of the thread, which i've addressed fairly obliquely: i think your observation is wrong, so any theory to explain it will, inherently, be false.

 

[David Howery]

When 2E came out, I was the DM for my group, so I could set it up as I wanted. I had no problems switching the group over, but I kept some stuff from 1E:
monks, as I was running a GH campaign, and they are pretty important in the whole Scarlet Brotherhood thing; I happily dumped assassins though.
Cavaliers and barbarians, heavily modified.

One thing I don't get from some comments on here: splatbooks. If you didn't like them, why not just ignore them? I did... I didn't allow any of the rules from the Options books, didn't use the Historical campaign books, etc. etc.... I stuck pretty much to the core rules, and allowed a few of the better balanced kits, but that was all....

 

[woodelf]

Yes, I absolutely agree with this statement. And in retrospect I'd have to say that I looked forward to 3e as almost revolutionary, whereas 2e seemed simply like a natural progression from 1e. Not sure if that has more to do with advertising and hype than with actual substance though...

Well, if by revolutionary you mean "a big change", then, yes, it definitely is. That's simple observation. Whether it's a big improvement, and whether the changes are novel/original, is where we get into more subjective territory.

 

[woodelf]

Yeah, I have a thought: This is not a fact; it's not even a backed-up opinion. IMO 2e was better than 1e and 3e was better than 2e.

The comparison between 3e and 1e is more like an Apple Classic II verus an IMac. I, however, admit the nonfactuality and complete subjectivity of this statement.

Um, maybe he likes PB&J more than hamburgers? Seriously, though, i'm pretty certain the point of his comparison was not that D&D3E is better or worse than AD&D1, just that they're hugely different. That's it.

BTW, i'm assuming you didn't intend to analogize D&D3E to an Apple II, vs. AD&D1 as an iMac, did you?