No Second Edition Love?

[WayneLigon]

I liked 2E when it came out. It streamlined a lot of stuff and incorported things that had been favorite house rules for years. I never felt it went far enough, but it was OK for the time.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

As was said, the good rules aspects of 2E are with us in 3E. Unfortunately, 2E had a lot of stuff that was just plain messy and is mostly best off forgotten.

I still see plenty of love for 2E settings.

 

[Shadowslayer]

I think 2e had more of an influence on gaming then will ever really be recognized. For good or ill, 2e was the only edition of D&D that actually said "this is not a combat game" in its intro. It was the edition that took D&D "out of the dungeon", so to speak. (personally, I say thanks that 3e wised up and went BACK to the dungeon....but thats just me)

Before 2e, I'd be willing to bet there weren't many roll-play vs role-play arguments.

So...thanks 2e. Loved your settings, but glad you're gone anyway.

 

[Turjan]

For me, 2e is all about the settings. I guess you will find the fans somewhere on boards about those settings.

 

[XO]

Gimp Magic

That says it all... We were running around with machine gun archmages and this "thing" came along

I think stuff tends to boil down to old-and-simple (1e) or new-and-robust (3e). 2e splits the difference and satisfies neither.

You may criticize Gygax prose all you want, I could pick up my 1E DMG or my PHB and just read them with pleasure, awkwardness and all. There were strange areas. And a 1E DMG STILL has more text than a 3.5 one (word for word, given the font size, tinier art, and much savvier contents).

Basically, it had soul, whereas 2e seemed contrived by the wrong people, and 3e / 3.5 has the most horrendous dull repetitive blatantly normalized PC texts I've read... They may somehow satisfy a need for even-handedness in rules writing, but I've seen legal texts that had more punch (read a few decisions by more opinionated judges and you will have to agree).

2e ecologies were a foray into rational explanations a fantasy game should not need. Wanna know where monsters come from? When children eat sweets before going to bed, or when they have nightmares, the world seizes upon their dreams, infuses them with magic and drops a monstrous being somewhere.... That explains the variety.

Still play 3.5 though, but we're talking about IT (the return to 1e)... 3.5 is awful system for modules and protracted for fights. We're talking about it....

 

[thedungeondelver]

IN MY OPINION...

if you:

• Stuck with the core classes from AD&D1 (for example, the Assassin goes back in, "specialist mages" (yuck) are merged back together as the magic-user).
  
  Stuck with the mechanics as outlined in the original 1989(?) release of 2nd Edition
  
  Used the original DUNGEON MASTER'S GUIDE from first edition to bolster the anemic 2e version

...then 2e wasn't a bad game. I never cared for the settings but the emphasis in a post-Gygax TSR was to bury Greyhawk and all things associated with it, hence we got DRAGONLANCE, FORGOTTEN REALMS et al. After the attempts to tear down Greyhawk with some of the sillyness that came along early in 2nd edition's product cycle, there were some valid attempts to "fix" things, but it was too little too late, IMO.

 

[Raloc]

I started with 2e, before kits were around. I have a fairly large amount of nostalgia regarding this period (I think it has something to do with the prevalence of "fluff" in 2e vs. in 3e). I have no delusions regarding the breakdown of 2e over time (Skills & Powers I recall really started to mess things up...). Although I do definitely recognize that the core game (with some exceptions) was generally pretty good (THAC0 was kind of counter-intuitive given a positive based system works just as well, and the saves were all over the place) and a lot of that "goodness" has crossed into 3e and become more cohesive and usable overall.

 

[Ourph]

I think 2e had more of an influence on gaming then will ever really be recognized. For good or ill, 2e was the only edition of D&D that actually said "this is not a combat game" in its intro. It was the edition that took D&D "out of the dungeon", so to speak. (personally, I say thanks that 3e wised up and went BACK to the dungeon....but thats just me)

Before 2e, I'd be willing to bet there weren't many roll-play vs role-play arguments.

So...thanks 2e. Loved your settings, but glad you're gone anyway.

QFT.

2e was the schizophrenic step-child of 1e. It claimed "this is not a combat game" and then went on to attempt to create a non-combat game around slightly modified heavily combat-oriented rules.

 

[Moon-Lancer]

all the dms i know that are really into 2e are really odd, and all seem trip on power. They all make really bad 3.5 dms of the worst kind. needless to say, i don't play with them anymore. I remember quite distinctly when my elf got magically put to sleep in the first session of a 3.5 game by a 2e dm. It was the first time magic sleep was cast on my many elves i have played, and still is the first time i could have used that immunity. However he could not adapt as immunity to sleep clashed with his story telling, even though their were many ways to deal with the situation (non lethal damage). that was also the last game I played with him.

Perhaps i have just bad luck with 2e dms... but it still has given me a stigma against 2e.

 

[Nathan P. Mahney]

2e was *my* edition. I started gaming in '89, just as it hit. It's the version of D&D that I'm most familiar with, the one that I can run most smoothly, and the one that I hold the most nostalgia for.

Rules-wise I like it better than 1e. For one thing, you can actually find things in the rules! The 1e DMG is a far superior product, but it's a bugger for looking stuff up. I've never liked having to look up to-hit tables, so THAC0 was always good (until you had to explain it to new players). It's less contradictory, more streamlined, and (an important thing that 3e disregarded) it's almost completely compatible with the previous edition. You want to run Keep on the Borderlands? Go for it, crack it open and you can start right away.

Looking back, fluff-wise I like it a lot less. It's much less influenced by the pulps than 1e was. The game doesn't feel as dangerous. I can't pinpoint it, but it's a lot of little things. No assassin players. Discouragement of evil PCs. No half-orc. All the demons and devils renamed, and the demon princes and arch-devils gone completely. The focus of the game shifting from the dungeon.

I don't hold a lot of fondness for the settings. We played in a pseudo-Forgotten Realms cobbled together from what we read in the novels, but none of us paid much attention to the official setting. We played a little Dragonlance, but got sick of kender and draconians all the time. None of the others got much time.

So I've played a lot of 2e, moreso than 3e. I played a bit of BECMI D&D, and enjoyed that a lot - it may just be the game distilled to its purest form. I've never actually played 1e, just scoured the rulebooks, and the same goes for OD&D - I'm actually thinking of running a time travel game that runs through every edition, but that's a topic for another day.