NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="teitan" data-source="post: 9054196" data-attributes="member: 3457">I loved 2e for a bit, I started on a 0e/Greyhawk and 1e PHB hybrid and we got 2e in 1991 but still used a mishmash of 1e, 0e and 2e sources since they were really easy to use together. What I liked was the new way of doing Thieves so they weren't so ineffective before level 4 unless they were climbing a wall and specialty priests made them interesting even if the implementation of the explanation of how to use them left a lot of room to be desired in the PHB until the Complete Book of Priests or Legends & Lore came out. I thought they messed up the ranger, sorry, they did, they messed it up. At first I liked the NWP system but as time went on and they added more some of them started to blur the lines with thieves skills etc so that two disparate skill systems allowed for non-thieves to do things better than a thief. I also disliked how a lot of optional systems, when you cracked open a book, weren't so optional as time went by and the sourcebooks became very incestuous, referring to one another so that you needed to complete the eco system to really understand what you were reading. Examples include the reliance of Planescape on Legends & Lore, which was not in Print when the boxed set was released and when the GH98 materials came out the deities weren't even discussed, just a list of names and their sphere of influence and a reference to the then definitely OOP From the Ashes set that was already garnering high prices on the secondary markets. WOTC alleviated that a bit by making the pages available for download but it still hurt the project overall after busting it down from a boxed set to individually published books. WHat 2e excelled at though was making AD&D easier to run. It was still AD&D at its core, it was simpler, initiative was easier to understand, THAC0 was easier (it was already part of the AD&D eco system by the time the 1e DMG came out) and the move of several rules over to the PHB helped as well. The DMG wasn't the 1e DMG by a long shot but it was NOT nearly as bad as its made out to be nowadays. It was a very different product from the 1e book in every way and was measured by the standard of the 1e book. It was the more easy to use material from the DMG, magic items etc and a toolkit, and advice but had moved to the standard for gaming at that time where the odd random tables etc had moved out of vogue and RPGs had become story games. The materials that once were the purview of the 1e DMG moved to the DMGR series. It made for a more practical DMG for new DMs. The Monstrous Compendium was a decent idea that in the long term was not a good idea. The Monstrous Manual and going to a book format really saved the Monster books.The less said about the revised 2e books the better. So ugly. You had to tie a steak to its neck to get a dog to play with it.</blockquote>

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