Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="eyebeams" data-source="post: 3323915" data-attributes="member: 9225">Some observations:1) I have met far more people who played 2e RAW than 1E RAW, by which I mean I have *never* met anyone who ran 1e RAW, ever. I know that these people exist, but when people hold forth on 1e's superiority they often really mean 1E without the official surprise, initiative, tactical movement, unarmed combat or armour type rules. And of course, everybody adopted THAC0, which was ported into 2e anyway. Maybe 2e's core systems were inferior to a version of 1e that you lobotomized and stitched back together, but in those cases, the credit doesn;t belong to 1e. It belongs to the "surgeon."2) 2e suited the fashions of the time, which were geared to highly standardized game systems, exemplified by GURPS. In fact, if you read Dragon Magazine or were paying attention to general scuttlebutt at the time, gamers *constantly* complained about confusing powergaming combos and strange exceptions interfering with their games. There was a very strong movement to add some point-based schemes to the game (and these eventually made it into the DMG in a limited way) and a real hatred of oddball classes. Much of the community felt stung over Unearthed Arcana's new classes and races. 3) This is going to ruffle some feathers, but the fact is that this is a 3e-based community drawn in large part by WotC marketing, and part of WotC's strategy was to encourage as much dislike of the old edition as possible. It's sound marketing to try and disrupt the remaining 2e player network, since it recruited players without having any strong presence as consumers. In other words, the company wanted to you pay some money and play 3e instead of game with an existing 2e group that hadn't bought anything since '94. This community is a legacy of that strategy.4) The last point is simple enough: 2e went for a decade or so without any major updates. If TSR provided adventure support for a few concentrated lines and came out with 2.5e in 1995 I have a feeling that sentiments would be much different.</blockquote>

Verification