The mythical ideal of 1E?

[teitan]

I think in many cases some people neglect 2nd because of Gary and how it was taken away from him pretty much.

They are very similar when you look under the hood, sort of like 3.0 to 3.5 really.

I beg to differ. The changes from 1e to 2e didn't require much in way of conversion documents but in rules implementation. You could use 1e monster stats with 2e monster stats with no problems. Heck, you could run Basic D&D adventures in 1e or 2e without conversion really. Running a 1e, 2e or BD&D adventures amounted to the same amount of conversion as running a Vampire the Masquerade 1e module with 2e or 2eR.

3e to 3.5 is a different story altogether. All the little changes, many of which were absolutely unnecessary resulted in a lot of compatibility issues with 3e and 3.5 material, some hefty conversions as well. While on the surface the changes between 3e and 3.5 seem small, they actually added up to some significant differences in how the game was played and even the flavour of the game in some minor but important ways. Many spells no longer worked the same way, many skills were very different and a lot of the flavour started to goin a wildly different direction. The latter isn't really a compatibility issue though. For an example of what I mean look to Return to the Temple of ELemental Evil's conversion document from 3e to 3.5 or City of the Spider-QUeen... ugh.

 

[Betote]

3e to 3.5 is a different story altogether. All the little changes, many of which were absolutely unnecessary resulted in a lot of compatibility issues with 3e and 3.5 material, some hefty conversions as well. While on the surface the changes between 3e and 3.5 seem small, they actually added up to some significant differences in how the game was played and even the flavour of the game in some minor but important ways. Many spells no longer worked the same way, many skills were very different and a lot of the flavour started to goin a wildly different direction. The latter isn't really a compatibility issue though. For an example of what I mean look to Return to the Temple of ELemental Evil's conversion document from 3e to 3.5 or City of the Spider-QUeen... ugh.

OTOH, I ran a 3.5 Crucible of Freya + Tomb of Abysthor + RttToEE campaign for months without changing a comma from the modules. OK, maybe there was a +1 here or there which was supposed to be different, but it didn't really matter, as if you ran an AD&D module using BECMI without changing the AC values. It's not the same, but it's not noticeable either.

Differences on the players' side between editions *are* important. Differences on the DM's side of the screen... If you don't tell, they generally won't notice

 

[teitan]

The fact that they tried to take things from us (paladins and barbarians for example) overshadowed the improvements.

When did they take away the Paladin? I also thought the reasoning behind dumping the Barbarian was valid personally.

 

[teitan]

When I got 2e I liked a lot of the changes. We'd always used Thac0 before 2e came out, so that was no big deal but I also noted a lot of the changes weren't necessarily unique to 2e like Non-Weapon Proficiencies but also Spheres and Specialization. Spheres were in Greyhawk Adventures and Dragonlance had specialization in it. I think the 2e rules were more a "what worked in 1e" and then change what didn't as opposed to a rules overhaul. I really liked the core and that they brought it all together in one book as opposed to the core plus 5 other hardcovers but that didn't mean that core 1e was unplayable either. the other hardcovers were optional. What I didn't like was that when the rules expansions started coming out for 2e was that all the optional rules weren't so optional. Psionics weren't optional. N-WPs weren't optional. Priests weren't optional... So what was basically 1e with some improvement became a different creature altogether. I also disliked the self-reference that occured in the books, especially in later years when some supplements and modules etc. referenced started getting pricey.

 

[M.L. Martin]

I did mention the removal of Gygaxian flavor, actually. The rest of that stuff, though? Not very significant for any of the dozens of folks that I played with. Without a doubt, for those folks, the lack of an Assassin and Half-Orc trumped everything on your list

Don't know about the half-orc, but the assassin was a Dead Class Walking from back when Gygax was planning 2E. There's an article about 2nd Edition in DRAGON (somewhere around the early 100s--it'd be before his farewell in #122) where he says it will be relegated to optional or NPC status.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Betote wrote:
Differences on the players' side between editions *are* important. Differences on the DM's side of the screen... If you don't tell, they generally won't notice

I agree. End of the day, when the PCs are fighting Monster X does it matter if Monster X is a carbon copy of a stat block in the Monster Manual or just very similar? Or even completely different. It's still an encounter.

My old group swapped over to 2e slowly. And we always kept what we wanted out of 1e. A bastard hybrid kept us quite happy. But we liked the changes for the most part. Not that ridiculous bowing to the religious reich and removing 'Devils' and 'Demons.' That always p****d me off. But over all liked the changes.

Never had many of the complete series and I can't remember much about them. Wasn't there the Complete Psionic? IIRC that was pretty cool. Nicely flavourful and yet at the same time a good reworking of the psionic 'rules' as they had been in 1e.

Can't say as I ever noticed a change in writing style. I'm sure there was one, but I never noticed. Doubt I'd have cared if I had.

cheers all.

 

[RFisher]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't a lot of the small changes and refocusing of D&D that occured with the 2E revision a response to how most people played the game, and the most commonly used houserules?

The difference between 1e and 2e is akin to 3.0e and 3.5e to me. There may actually be more mechanical difference, but they are highly compatible.

If choosing a preference, though, 1e wins mainly through Gygax’s voice, ununified Illusionist, and ununified Druid.

The big thing, however, is that I’ve come to the conclusion that “how most people played” 1e is not necessarily the best way to play 1e.

 

[Hussar]

/snip

I think that's the big difference between AD&D and now: in AD&D, the drive (character advancement) is the goal, not the destination (being superpowered). That's not mythical or mystical or whatever to me, that's concrete.

Well...as concrete as a dice-and-paper bildungsromen can be.

See, this right there exactly illustrates my point. I never saw D&D as bildungsroman in any form. But, again this goes back to how we played.

I played with xp for gp and a lot of modules. This meant that the advancement that I saw in the games was pretty rapid in the single digit levels. You could get name level in a year of play without too much difficulty playing that way. So, most of the time, we were playing between 3rd and 9th with 1st and 2nd being something of a blip at the beginning and the low double digit levels being the final slog at the end.

So, IME, you were fighting armies single handedly. Heck, the GDQ series of modules sees you fighting armies of GIANTS at 6th level. And winning. Even at very low levels, something like Keep on the Borderland has encounters with dozens of opponents that you are expected to win at first level.

To me, PC's were always well above the norm. Normal man was 1d4 hit points and an AC of 8. My fighter had twice (at least) as many hit points and an AC of 2 or 3 at first level (banded and shield and certainly chain and shield were not out of the question at 1st level in AD&D and a Dex of 15 got you a -1 AC. Certainly nothing earth shattering there).

Again, to me, there has never been a time when the PC's were "just a bit stronger than the average Joe". My first level character was already capable of wiping out a bar full of average Joes, and by 3rd level, I was getting 3 attacks per round against Joe Average. (Gotta love going Mulinex mode on the under 1 HD crowd)

Never mind using things like Unearthed Arcana to build a paladin with ALL the Cavalier powers PLUS paladin powers.

Now, before this turns into yet another edition war, I'M NOT SAYING DUNGEON DELVER IS WRONG. HE'S NOT WRONG. Let me restate that again, I DO NOT DISAGREE IN ANY WAY, SHAPE, or FORM with Dungeon Delver. What I'm saying is that the experiences that one person had when compared to the next person become extremely varied depending on a whole host of starting points. That's why it can sometimes look like nostalgia talking. It's not really. I truly believe that people honestly had those experiences. It's just that because 1e was generally kit bashed beyond all recognition by the majority of tables, that trying to draw any meaningful points of comparison is extremely difficult.

 

[Greg K]

For all the complaining about the 3.x splats, they were really elegant compared to the Complete Mess.

I attributed that to the patchwork nature of 2e as a system. 3e has, imo, a core system to build upon which is why 3e's version of kits (i.e, UA style class variants) were better.

 

[Jack Daniel]

Now my group by and large played AD&D 2e after we had done with and discarded the D&D Basic Set. We (like many younger gamers, I suppose) thought that Basic ---> Advanced, and never even knew that it was a separate game that went onto Expert &c.

So we grew up with 2e. Certainly, at the time, lots of "1e-isms" still dominated the AD&D-playing culture, but we just kind of dismissed them as archaisms which were of no use to us modern-day gamers. "What are these 'magic-users' you speak of? Do you happen to mean 'mages,' old-timer?"

After a while, though, I really started to feel the lack of certain character options, like half-orcs and monks and barbarians, that ought to have been retained in 2e. We got half-orcs back in a Complete Book of Humanoids, and barbarians in a Complete Book of Barbarians, and we even sort of got assassins back in the Complete Book of Ninjas, which served as our "Oriental Adventures" rulebook throughout the 2e years. But an official 2e monk didn't come along until very late in the game (The Scarlett Brotherhood of Greyhawk supplement, from 1999!), so in order to have kung-fu kickin' monastics in our 2e games, we actually had to go dig up a 1e PHB. I did so, and my impressions were... mixed.

Mainly, it was a whole lot of snickering and "WTF?" reactions to the black and white cartoony art, the arcane and arbitrary rules, the flowery prose, and the odd race and class advancements. Demihuman level limits were mind-bogglingly lower in 2e than 1e; certain human classes (assassins, druids, monks) had level caps for no apparent reason; and then there was the crazy business with monks and rangers starting off at 2 hit dice, and "prestige" bards. (It wasn't until much, much later that I learned that all of these quirks were simply holdovers from OD&D and the Greyhawk and Blackmoor supplements, but I still thank my lucky stars that I grew up in the 2e era, so that I can be nostalgic about some clean and sensible rules!)

We ported the 1e monk into our 2e games, and in order to surpass the level 17 experience cap, we looked to the only analogue we knew: hierophant druids. So we just added some rules for grandmaster monks above level 17, and we were quite happy with our second edition game that used all the 2e core stuff, plus 2e ninjas, and 1e monks and half-orcs.

And we were happy that way for short couple of years: those were the best campaigns of our young gaming lives. The rules-bogged 3e games that followed them just never came close. 3e got me so fed up with the "rules heavy" style that I switched to the Cyclopedia, but that's another story.