No Second Edition Love?

[Faraer]

That quote from The Horde is very close. But it's hardly an edition thing -- compare the distortion of the Faerûn map in the 3E Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting.

 

[Garnfellow]

On one hand, 2e did an excellent job in terms of taking the confused, inconsistent, and bloated 1st edition ruleset and streamlining and reorganizing it into the three new core rulebooks. I think the 2e PHB still holds up as a solid piece of design. The 2e DMG a little less so, and the Monstrous Compendiums even less than that. But from a game mechanics standpoint, I thought 2e cleaned up a lot of things that I hated in 1st edition, and I greatly enjoyed the shift in tone away from "if you don't run your game exactly like Gary says you should, you're not playing REAL AD&D."

2e also produced some fantastic campaign supplements with great production values. Not so many great adventures, but plenty of excellent settings books that still hold up today. Unfortunately, TSR produced far too many supplements for far too many lines, so the really good books often got submerged beneath the tides of mediocre ones.

I think 2e was marred a terrible series of splatbooks with unbalanced mechanics and no overarching sense of consistent design. I still remember the disappointment of reading the "Complete Fighter's Handbook" with such crappy illustrations, boring copy, and uninspiring design. It felt half-baked and rushed: if the 2e PHB was an A, this thing was a C- at best. This inconsistency across the complete XX line helped tar 2e for many gamers as a broken game for munchkins. Eventually TSR got the message and some of the later books in the line were excellent, but by that time the horse was already out of the barn, so to speak.

The Monstrous Compendium concept of three-ring bound monster sheets was a great idea in theory but far less successful in practice and again plagued by less than stellar execution.

But probably the worst mistake TSR made was to remove demons and devils from the game. Just an incredibly short-sighted move, and by the time TSR realized its mistake it was a little too late. I wept no tears for the removal of the monk, assassin, or half-orc from the game -- I just didn't care for the mechanics and I thought they weren't great thematic fits. But no demons or devils? Come on!

I really enjoyed the 2e epoch, and thought the revisions to the core rules made it a much stronger game engine than 1st edition. 2e kept me playing D&D for 10 more years, rather than jumping over to GURPS or RuneQuest or some other alternative system. But I think the excellent revisions to the core rules and the occasionally great setting books were in many ways overshadowed by an incredibly weak line of splatbooks and some horrible marketing decisions.

 

[Greg K]

I started with 1e, but prefered 2e. However, I left with 2e and would not play either now as I find 3e to be mechanically much closer to what I want (more so if you factor in 3rd party support). That said, there are aspects of 2e that I do prefer to 3e including

1) 2e settings
2) 2e spheres to domains
3) the default flavor . I despise 3.Xs halfling riding dogs, the alchemical equipment, many of the weapons (i.e., orgosh's, mercurial weapons, spiked chains, etc.)
4) less emphasis on mechanical balance on all aspects of the game (Monster classes, Legacy weapons, Scion class (from UA))
5) the lack of a sense of player entitlement. And, yes, I do see a lot of players with a sense of entitlement at the WOTC boards if many of those posters there are to be taken seriously.

 

[Greg K]

I think 2e was marred a terrible series of splatbooks with unbalanced mechanics and no overarching sense of consistent design. I still remember the disappointment of reading the "Complete Fighter's Handbook" with such crappy illustrations, boring copy, and uninspiring design. It felt half-baked and rushed: if the 2e PHB was an A, this thing was a C- at best. This inconsistency across the complete XX line helped tar 2e for many gamers as a broken game for munchkins. Eventually TSR got the message and some of the later books in the line were excellent, but by that time the horse was already out of the barn, so to speak.
.

I consider the WOTC 3.x class books to be uninspiring and boring with terrible base classes and plethora of horrible PrCs. And in terms of format, I'll take the Complete Handbooks of 2e with their dedication to a single class or race over the approach taken in the 3.x class and race books.
I will not deny that many of the 2e kits sucked or were overpowered. The kits from the 2e Complete Handbooks often suffered from the poor unstreamlined and patchwork set of rules from which the designer had to work. However, given a choice between the 2e Completes and their 3.x WOTC counterparts, I'll take the 2e books anytime just for the Complete Thief's Handbook, Complete Priest's Handbook, and Complete Druid's Handbook.

 

[Remathilis]

Confession time: I went from the Rules Cyclopedia to 2e to 3.0 to 3.5 I missed 1e and almost any version of the game prior to 1990.

Granted, 2e could come off as soulless, but it had some great ideas. And some great supplements (Complete Bards Handbook and Complete Druid's Handbook are by far the two best written 2e supplements).

The interesting thing seems to be the concept that most of the 2e players went on to become the 3e fanatics. Few stayed in 2e (after the first year or so at least) and unlike 1e (which has a huge following still) 2e's has mostly been gobbled up by 3e.

Its interesting (and perhaps a bit saddening) but given how TSR took the game, not completely surprising.

 

[Faraer]

And in terms of format, I'll take the Complete Handbooks of 2e with their dedication to a single class or race over the approach taken in the 3.x class and race books.

I don't see a great difference between the two. Except for some good ideas and discussions scattered here and there, does either series consistently make campaigns better?

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

I liked 2nd edition just fine. The best campaigns I've run were 2nd edition. Were they better because it was 2E? Heck if I know. I really like 3E, and I recognize 2E's limitations and occasional wonkiness, but I was very happy in my gaming during the '90's.

 

[rossik]

i love 2ed ad&d...

i started with d&d box (the big black one, with the red dragon attacking), but then, some monthes later they release ad&d 2ed . so, here i am!

(in brazil we just had that d&d box, ad&d 2ed and now all the d20 cores)

 

[Hussar]

2E drove a lot of players away.

I enjoyed it when it was out, but some in my D&D group left the game because of 2E's wildly inconsistent and unbalanaced rules (the Bladesinger was the most insidious in our group).

I loved Planescape 2E, though.

Y'know, I hear this a lot. That 2e drove players away. Yet, by the time 2e came out, the players were already gone. The fad that was DnD had ended years before 2e hit the stores. I think that 2e gets a very bad rap for somehow driving a stake into the hobby. The hobby was already shrinking pretty rapidly by the time 2e pops up.

Heck, I know that at Purple Dragon (the University of Western Ontario) gaming club, everyone had moved on to 2e with nary a murmur. The gaming stores I went to also featured very regular 2e games. I didn't even know that people even played 1e anymore until I discovered the internet.

But, really, I think it has been said best that those who didn't move on to 2e either got out of the hobby or stuck with earlier editions to this day while those who moved on from 1e saw 3e as a very natural progression of the game. 2e pretty much had its legs cut out from under it because 3e's ruleset is much tighter and 1e appeals better to the old school gamers.

On another point, Gregk, you actually liked the Complete Priest? Good grief, I thought it was a complete waste of dead trees. Let's take the 2e priest, which isn't an unbalanced class on its own, nerf it hard to the point where the class is pretty much useless and then try to tell everyone that this is how priests should be. And then, let's completely contradict that with Faiths and Avatars, which turns priests into ungodly monstrocities.

 

[Aaron L]

2nd Edition was 1st Edition with the flavor stripped out. It wasn't a new edition, it was a small revision of 1E. It was pandering to those who called D&D satanic by the renaming of demons and devils, the removal of the Assassin class and half-orcs as a playable race, and the "Evil characters are discouraged" passage in the PHB. It had the dumbing down of magic resistance rules and the mutilation of the Ranger class into the "Drizzt Do'Urden class".

Yet at the same time as they stripped out the flavor, they piled unwieldy rules on top of the already disjointed core of 1E, giving us multiple conflicting systems for accomplishing the same tasks. Just how many martial arts systems did 2E have? We would get a system for something in one splat book, and get a completely new system for the same task in another, because the writers of the books were hired apparently without ever having read any of the other splatbooks.

The loads of contradictory splat books were written by seemingly random freelancers with little attempt at standardization of format between them, and an apparent lack of any kind of editorial management of power balance across them. Thus we got the miserable Complete Fighter's Handbook and the equally dismal Thief's Handbook, the disjointed Priest's Handbook, and then the flavorful Paladin's Handbook and Bard's Handbook.


Essentially they put the non-weapon proficiency system out of the Wilderness and Dungeoneers Survival Guides into the PHB, cut the DMG by 3/4, excised the Evil classes and races, ignored Unearthed Arcana except for Weapon Specialization, and marketed it as 2nd Edition so they wouldn't have to pay royalties to Gygax. All of the changes of 2E except for the revamped monsters could have been implemented in a pamphlet. The changes from 3E to 3.5 were slightly more extensive.


I started playing D&D with 2E and switched to 1E when I the group I played with said it was their preferred game. I quickly found it to be a much more entertaining.

There were a few good things, such as the customizable Thief skill progression, the increase of the ridiculously low racial level limits, the improvement of monster power (especially dragons and extraplanar creatures), and the Monstrous Manual presentation was excellent, but in all it came across to me as a rush job to repackage 1E in new books with a sweeping gloss of political correctness and superficial streamlining of the rules that didn't really improve anything.


The settings were the greatest saving grace of 2E. But that's probably because there were so many of them some were bound to be good.