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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Orius" data-source="post: 3944910" data-attributes="member: 8863">An amusing breakdown.  The 3e version seems a bit snarkier than the others, but in general, it comes off as a fairly accurate representation of how the game was played.  In the old days, the M-U simply knocked everything out with sleep and the rest of the party slaughtered them.  Leaders just tacked on a few extra HD.  There were lots of save or die traps to do in the thief.  The 2e version might have come off better if it was set in the Realms.  Every other adventure in 2e was in the Realms. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />  And yeah, there was tons of extra useless flavor that made little difference (like the part about the secret passage; how is that ever going to matter to the players?).  And the bit about weapon specialization was spot on. The tables skewed toward longsword, but IME, nobody use longswords in 2e, many fighters preferred bastard swords instead, probably because it could be used both one handed and two handed, and had different damage potentials like that.I know I'm jumping in late here, but yeah Type F poison (inflicted by wyverns, among other things from what I remember), was set up as very common, and it was definitely save or die.  I don't know the 1e poison mechanics, but I remember 2e vaguely.  They were divided into 3 categories, Ingested, Injected, and Contact, and F was an Injected save or die.  A LOT of monsters that had posion attacks had Type F.  I couldn't have said it better.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />The biggest problem with 2e was the fact that it was intended for "intermediate and expert" players from the start (it says that right on the covers of the original 2e PHB and DMG).  The idea was for newbies to get started with BECMI or the Rules Cyclopedia, then move up to AD&D.  However, by the time 2e reached it's midpoint, the old Basic game had pretty much died out, and AD&D was all that was left.  So the DMG was intended for players who learned to DM through BD&D, and wasn't that helpful for novice DMs.  It didn't try to teach DMs how to DM, it just said, "go read Dragon, there's lots of advice in there".  At least while Monte Cook's 3e DMG admitted that it was difficult to teach DMing, it made an attempt to offer pointers to both novice and experienced DMs.To be fair, after the death of BD&D, the D&D team put out at least 3 introductory products intended to help newer players get into the game, and the revised DMG does steer new DMs towards the first such product, but small introductory boxed sets really didn't have the scope of the old Basic game.Well, I can't speak for the early stuff, but yes 2e kits could get off the wall.  They weren't bad early on, and Skills and Powers made a decent attempt at standarizing the more common kits, but the later Complete Books had some really unbalanced ones (*cough* Bladesinger).  Skills and Powers had some good ideas, like the proficiency system (sort of a proto-3e skill system), and revamped the psionics system, but the biggest problem was the subabilities.  Another problems is that some of that 2e stuff was freelanced and there wasn't any sort of central design team trying to keep things relatively balanced.I do prefer the 3e rules, but honestly, I've been kind of out of the loop with how the game developed ever since the 3.5 revision; my rulebooks are all 3.0 stuff.   Yeah, the 2e weapon proficiency rules were very restrictive.  Basically, a DM if he knew what he was doing would simply swap out a weapon no one was proficient with with something more useful.  Otherwise the party would be stuck with it if the DM was either inexperienced, or was just a mean rat bastard.  The weapon rules in 3e did fix that with the Simple, Martial, and Exotic weapons, it went back a bit to the Fighter being able to use most weapons, and Exotic weapons also helped keep weird weapon choices under control IME.</blockquote>

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