What was so bad about the Core 2e rules? Why is it the red-headed stepchild of D&D?

[Ahglock]

That's because Skills and Powers was pretty broken. The subabilities broke it the worst, like the division of Strength into Muscle/Stamina. If you had a fighter with 17 Str, you could split the 17 as 19 Muscle and 15 Stamina. What this did was boost you way past all the Exceptional Strength levels right into attack and damage bonuses for 19 Str. IIRC, 17 Str was +1/2 and 19 was +4 attack and either +7 or +9 damage. A HUGE unbalanced jump, especially since none of the PHB races had Str bonuses allowing for a 19 Str at creation, 18/00 was the highest possible. And Stamina? It just affected carrying capacity and encumbrance.

That was the single most egregious piece of imbalance, though several subabiliites were almost as bad. The Int subabilities had one that affected wizard spells and another that affected NWPs IIRC, so most players of non-wizards just used the spell one as a dump sub-stat to boost their NWPs. I think Dex had some breakage as well. I didn't mind the point-based character creation, though I think some hated it as a GURPSification of D&D. Even that though, probably needed some DM policing to maintain balance.

IIRC the Int sub-abilities were actually fairly balanced. One side was like reasoning and the other memory. Memory effected the max spells known per level, logic the %chance to learn a spell. But yeah the strength divide kind of wrecked any chance of those ever being used in my games. Lots of things in skills and powers were good though, and combat and tacitcs and spells and magic had loads of awesome material.

 

[RFisher]

Would you say you had a plethora of pinatas?

I would say “piñatas” myself. ^_^

We don't conjugate verbs

Well, we do not, but he does.

 

[mxyzplk]

IIRC the Int sub-abilities were actually fairly balanced. One side was like reasoning and the other memory. Memory effected the max spells known per level, logic the %chance to learn a spell. But yeah the strength divide kind of wrecked any chance of those ever being used in my games. Lots of things in skills and powers were good though, and combat and tacitcs and spells and magic had loads of awesome material.

I liked the Player's Option concept, but the implementation was half-assed. Many other games do point-based builds successfully and it's a nice option to have in D&D. In fact, the multiclassing flexibility of 3e captured a lot of that and achieved 80% of the PO design goals without all the complexity.

I actually wrote a "Classless Skills & Powers" (includes Spells & Magic, Combat & Tactics, and High Level Campaigns) that tried to reconcile all of it into one meaningful and balanced system, my gaming group ran a couple campaigns using it successfully.

My gaming group(s) were all happy to go from 1e to 2e (ooo, THACO, nice) to 3e (ooo, real multiclassing and feats and skills, nice). 3.5e made us a little grumpy (very little change for a lot of our $$) and 4e has been universally rejected.

 

[Fifth Element]

Don't take it so literally. Of course English conjugates verbs. But compared to French, for example, our conjugation is minimal. Generally the same verb form for different subjects, for example. Past tense of "to go" is "went", regardless of whether I went, you went, he went, or they went.

 

[Fifth Element]

I figured since it's obvious English conjugates verbs, the OP must have meant nouns. Hey, I was a WRITING major, not a GRAMMAR major!

I explained what I meant above, and I did mention the lack of declension in my OP.

I took 12 years of French immersion education, so my main basis of comparison is French. Compared to French, English doesn't really conjugate verbs. So I should have included the "really", or a "very much" in the OP.

To build upon my last post, "went" can be one of allais, allait, allions, alliez, or allaient, depending on the subject. And that's just the imperfect tense, it could also be the simple past depending on context, which is one of allais, allas, alla, allames, allates, allerent (not bothergin with the accents).

 

[Ahglock]

I would say “piñatas” myself. ^_^

without the accent or whatever they are called over the N I was like what is a peen-a-tas?

Now I'm like oh yeah the candy filled things you hit with a stick. Who says violence does not solve anything.

 

[RFisher]

I explained what I meant above, and I did mention the lack of declension in my OP.

Yeah, but you had to know we couldn’t pass it up.

For what it’s worth, I’ve come to the conclusion that vocabulary and modes of speech tend to overshadow grammar in the long run. Most languages end up being about equally difficult in the long run. Immersion and daily use tends to work equally well for learning any of them.

Of course, that doesn’t count the advantage of already knowing a closely related language.

Although, I haven’t had enough experience with tones. They scare me. ^_^

 

[Orius]

IIRC the Int sub-abilities were actually fairly balanced. One side was like reasoning and the other memory. Memory effected the max spells known per level, logic the %chance to learn a spell. But yeah the strength divide kind of wrecked any chance of those ever being used in my games. Lots of things in skills and powers were good though, and combat and tacitcs and spells and magic had loads of awesome material.

I didn't really see much wrong with the subabilites when I first used them, but I've seen people complain about the Int score for it's dump stat tendancies. Only wizards ever really needed Memory, so naturally min-maxers dumped with it, and that meant more character points when you got to the NWP part of character creation. It's like I've said, S&P is decent, but dump the subabilities. They're needless complexity and rules breakage in one package.

What I liked about S&P was the NWP system (kind of a proto-3e skill system), and the approach to kits. What they did was kits is take some of the common kits that appeared in multiple splats, turned them into a generic kit anyone could take, and then made kit-related NWPs a bit cheaper to acquire. I thought that approach was great.

Possibly the PO psionics system was pretty good too, they took the old NWP-like powers (where low rolls were good and high rolls were bad) and revised them to work more like combat rolls, sort of like an early version of d20 standardization. I never used the PO psionics, and while they look good on paper, I'm not sure how well they worked in practice.

And the entire system as a whole was very good. There's some definite foundations of 3e rules there.

 

[eyebeams]

There may have been nothing wrong with the core game... aside from it really needing a shot in the arm. A lot of people had stopped playing AD&D in favor of other games and while the fundamentals of 2e were strong, TSR's ability to do anything with it seemed to be petering out. The complete books had extensive coverage to it would be hard to squeeze in really new content, campaign worlds were all over the place and had plenty more they could cover but at the expense of lots of niche products doomed to never gather too much market share.
I think there was plenty of writing on the wall that something needed to be done with 2e. Even TSR started experimenting with new rules with the PO series in order to extend it's life as the flagship product.

Well, consider that 12 years is a hell of a long time for a single edition of a line to exist. 1e and 2e both lasted for roughly the same length of time, and that was a very, very long time by RPG design and development standards. By contrast, consider that Vampire and Shadowrun each went through three editions *during* 2e's history. GURPS went through two editions, IIRC (the second and third).

So if the longest product life of any regularly printed edition of any RPG is "failure," I hope we get more of that -- it's pretty damn good.

 

[RFisher]

Well, consider that 12 years is a hell of a long time for a single edition of a line to exist. 1e and 2e both lasted for roughly the same length of time, and that was a very, very long time by RPG design and development standards. By contrast, consider that Vampire and Shadowrun each went through three editions *during* 2e's history. GURPS went through two editions, IIRC (the second and third).

So if the longest product life of any regularly printed edition of any RPG is "failure," I hope we get more of that -- it's pretty damn good.

If things are being done right, IMHO, each edition of a game should last longer than the one before. The rate of change for any product should slow over time.