No Second Edition Love?

[vrock]

I'm probably in the minority here, but I preferred 2nd ed over 1st. I starting gaming around the time when 2nd ed came out, but I also had a few hand-me-down 1st ed rule books and adventures. At the time it was just me, my younger brother and a buddy so we had to learn the game on our own without someone to guide us. We found that 2nd ed was just easier to understand rules wise and it's style suited our tastes better.

I ran a few 1st ed modules, but being new to the game I found them hard to follow and the sheer size of some of them was intimidating. Hack, slash and loot fests we're fun once in a while, but that's all some of those adventures were. They also didn't have a lot of DM direction in them, so it was hard to tell what the authors intent was with some of the encounters. Not to mention the obvious question that popped up from the players "How did these monsters get into this place with all of these traps, locked doors, and hungry critters about?"

2nd ed had it's quirks, but I really believe it was better for players and DM's just learning the game. Sure the core books were boring to read, but they really gave you direction on how the game was supposed to feel.

 

[Remathilis]

You know, its odd having never played 1e, to look back at it.

I recall the first time I cracked the "core three" 1e books. I had bought them cheap in a used book store (original covers in fact!) and wanted to learn what the differences were.

I walked away confused. I understood there wasn't proficiencies and there was a monk class, but I didn't expect a lot of things...

I couldn't find encumbrance rules! How much could I carry? Forget that, how far could I MOVE! Why didn't Illusionists get bonus XP for high ability scores? WHAT THE HECK WAS UP WITH THE RANGER? Where in the world is a "goblin" giant-class? Wait, how does initiative work again? Casting Time: 1 SEGMENT? And what's this about weapon speeds NOT affecting initiative? Elves can cast in armor?

Gygax's prose was elegant, but unwieldy. I loved when he riffed on the nature of cleric spells or gold in a dungeon, but I JUST WANTED TO FIND THE SILLY MOVEMENT RULES! There was no organization, no attempt to get like-concepts together. Ultimately, I decided I liked 2e more, if for no other reason I knew what my movement rate in armor was!

In short, I salute all of you who ever used those books to game, my inner Virgo cried trying to look anything up!

 

[GeorgeFields]

There's a new 2E module released, there, too: Church of the Poisoned Mind.

Isn't that an old Culture Club song?

 

[Prince of Happiness]

I recall the first time I cracked the "core three" 1e books.

I couldn't find encumbrance rules!

Gygax's prose was elegant, but unwieldy. I loved when he riffed on the nature of cleric spells or gold in a dungeon, but I JUST WANTED TO FIND THE SILLY MOVEMENT RULES! There was no organization, no attempt to get like-concepts together. Ultimately, I decided I liked 2e more, if for no other reason I knew what my movement rate in armor was!

In short, I salute all of you who ever used those books to game, my inner Virgo cried trying to look anything up!

Yeah, all the encumberance specifics were in the DMG (for 1E). I'm not sure if it was expected for the DM to go over each player's character sheet, add up the encumberance and then tell them their movement rates, or something.

Back to 2E, I still can't get over non-weapon proficiencies. The fact that there was nothing to address little things we take for granted now (like Spot checks), and non-thief listening drove me nuts, and the skill system did not help address that. And for both 1E and 2E, what the heck are you supposed to do with that Secondary Skill chart thing?

 

[Mark Hope]

Back to 2E, I still can't get over non-weapon proficiencies.

How can you not love a system that has a separate proficiency just for cheesemaking?

 

[Prince of Happiness]

How can you not love a system that has a separate proficiency just for cheesemaking?

Hmm, especially when you can make medicinal cheese (or cheeeeeese) from the Shining South supplement? Hmmm...

 

[T. Foster]

The encumbrance specifics were actually only in the revised edition (December 1979) of the 1E DMG -- if you had an early printing then the encumbrance values for everything except weapons and armor weren't in there at all. I'm convinced that this table should've been in the PH and was accidentally overlooked, and since they were doing a revised edition of the DMG anyway they decided to put it there. I always copied this page and gave it to the players. The rules for how much weight/bulk you can carry in each move class is in the PH, around p. 100 (starting on the page right after the end of the spell descriptions with the Trampier illustration of guys sitting around in a tavern) but the armor rules are an exception (since each armor type has a max move rate associated with its bulk -- if you wear plate-mail your move is 6" no matter how high your strength score -- see also a contradiction in the rules regarding the encumbrance/move for magical armor) and internal evidence suggests that size S demi-human races (dwarfs, gnomes, halflings) should also have a lower base move (9" at unencumbered, 6" at heavy gear, 3" at very heavy gear, 1" at encumbered) even though this isn't actually specifically mentioned anywhere in the 1E rules!

Yeah, the 1E rules are an organizational and editorial mess. If 2E had simply cleaned up and better organized the 1E rules without changing things I'd have welcomed them. Alas, they didn't just clean up and reorganize the rules, they also decided to fix/improve them, and most/all of their "improvements" were IMO anything but.

 

[painandgreed]

Now, if we're talking about people who were growing gradually bored with AD&D's loosely-structured mechanics, AD&D didn't change enough to make them happy, and a lot of them left completely - hence the upswing in existing games like Rolemaster, Runequest, HERO/Champions, etc. etc.

WoD! In my case and those I played games with (in three different cities), it was a mass migration to Vampire. New game and new system plus influx of new (previsouly non-gamer) players (of which many were female) meant that 2E got played less and less even though everybody had migrated over from 1E without issue. Plus many of the AD&D players were doing things like Planescape and Dark Sun which drove away traditional players who didn't want bizarre settings.

 

[Rothe]

[qb]Originally Posted by Henry
Correct, that I know of; the people I've talked to who went to other game systems after AD&D was because they were already getting fed up with the mechanics of AD&D, and the 2nd edition was either not enough, or the "nail in the coffin." We never left AD&D, but we heavily modified the mechanics to every single game our groups ever played, each person putting their own spin on it.

Now, when we play 3E, we mainly play exactly like the rules, but the DM just accepts or denies different rules sources/classes/feats/spells/etc., rather than sitting down and hammering out an amalgam of the wishes of player and DM.

[/qb]


ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE ALERT!! THE FOLLOWING MEANS NOTHING TO ANYONE EXCEPT FOR ME!

That's exactly what happened to me too. I left D&D prior to 2e, and while I looked at 2e from time to time and was interested in some of the settings, if nothing else, I'm not sure that I actually understood at the time that it was a new edition as opposed to just new printings, revisions, etc. 2e still looked too much like 1e to tempt me back, in other words.

For what it's worth, which isn't much, these andecdotes mean a lot to me. Henry's experience was much my own, although we tried pretty much every non-TSR RPG that came out from 1976-1980.

I completely missed 2e as well. I saw it in stores and really thought it was just a spruced up 1e. Anyway couldn't afford the $ or time to play. Next I surface to the RPG world and 3.5e is out.

 

[Ranger REG]

It obviously means neither, as you're trying to define one or more optional books as corebooks. The PHB, DMG and MM were the 2e corebooks.

2e vs 3e RAW only? Meh. That's like comparing vinyl vs. MP3.