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

[ExploderWizard]

My feelings?

Bland, dumbed-down, simplified, whitewashed. I was turned off the instant I saw the books -- huge type font, lots of whitespace, helpful little icons everywhere, like the pictures of the food on the cash registers at fast food places. The actual game content kept almost all the "bugs" of 1e and had none of the wacky, gonzo, charm. The removal of demons, devils, assassins, and half-orcs was a feeble, and failed, attempt to placate the Angry Mother faction. D&D went from being Iron Maiden to Pat Boone. Soulless. Utterly soulless.

2e kept me out of D&D (but not roleplaying) from 1989 to 2000.

Pretty close to my own experience. We played a full 2E campaign for about a year before moving to 3E GURPS. I never got much in the way of splatbooks except for a couple of complete books. The game seemed to lose its coolness factor. Even the characters in the comic books were dissappointed-" Magic missile is useless now!" Mages were still very weak at lower levels and then chopped off at the knees at 10th level. So much for persistence bringing great power.

EDIT: On a side note, 4E has brought a new level of appreciation for 2E. Its kind of like the feeling I got after seeing the Star Wars prequels. Before 1999, I was not a huge fan of Return of the Jedi. After seeing Phantom Menace, Jedi looked like an awesome movie.

 

[el-remmen]

The 2E core assumption of the game tone is still the one I prefer - and while I generally think 3E was a vast improvement mechanically (some of which we were already using for years, like AoOs), I house-ruled 3e to keep a lot of 2e tone - esp. specialty priests which is the best part of 2E.

 

[Aus_Snow]

It struck me (and some others I knew) as soulless, not to mention largely redundant.

Perhaps if I ever gave it a real chance, it would be, how does that go again, awesome!

But that will never happen, and frankly, I don't care one bit.

 

[Obryn]

I think it wasn't a big enough step, personally.

1e, for me, has flavor, mystery, enchantment, and a loose enough system that free-form role-play is not just possible, it's required.

2e, by tightening the mechanics and making rules like non-weapon proficiencies core, feels like a more controlled and regulated game, minus a lot of 1e's charm.


Don't get me wrong - the mechanics are tighter, neater, and cleaner, even if I think some of the design decisions were asinine (like their use of weapon speed factors). It just didn't go far enough from its roots, IMHO. It's uncomfortably straddling the line between more free-form 1e gameplay, and the even tighter 3e system.

I'm running a 1e game right now. It kind of calls to me. I don't have any desire to run a 2e game... I love some of the settings, like Dark Sun, but the core rules are bland.

-O

 

[TerraDave]

This has probably been covered above, but I am going to just respond straight to the first post, as someone who played a lot of 2E:

Whats the problem the 2E core books: blah.

They did a small cleanup of the rules, but really drained away the style and flavour everywhere they could. Removing demons and devils (and half orcs and assasins) was part of a bigger pattern of dulling down the game. The writting, the art, the dm advice, its all over the place. Boring.

Whats the problem with the 2E core rules: half steps.

Yes, you could customize theif skills, but single class thieves just were not that good. Yes, it added NWP with a divergent d20 mechanic that didn't do much unless you took things like weapon specialization or blindfighting, which were really something else. They cleaned up a little here and there, but Thaco, seriously? Level limits for demi-humans? 8 different ways to be sneaky, 3 different ways to listen at a door? All those polearms, all those spells that rarely saw use, and the ones used too much...and the DMG was cleaned up so much, nothing was in it! It is true that this approach maintained backwards compatability, but it also left the game feeling increasingly dated.

But there is an even bigger problem today: 2E has a tiny niche.

The retro crowd is all about the flavour, style, and nostalgia of the older editions, 2E doesn't fit that as well. They don't really play by the book AD&D (or OD&D or B/XD&D), and have ways of dealing with its quirks (I now anticipate posts telling me how they play by the book...). And they don't really like NWP, thaco, and the latter bells and whistles. People who liked that stuff then liked skills, bab etc better and mostly play later editions.

Finally, and this is also important, all the stuff from the first post did bring down the rep of the game. When 3E came out you had one group of people who really wanted something new and another who didn't care...and kept playing 1E or RC D&D.

 

[Gentlegamer]

One thing I'm curious about though, what difference do sub-classes make? Did it make any difference that rangers were listed as a thing as themselves, rather than a sub-class of fighter? That's one change that seems so innocuous.

This is actually something I've been thinking about lately.

There's a bit of an incongruity in having character class groups such as Warrior, Wizard, Rogue, and Priest that have separate character classes under each (which essentially makes them related "sub-classes" of the overall grouping) and then also having character kits that are applied to character classes.

Things would have been much more logical if the class groupings actually were basic classes (that could be player customized) and alternatively having the pre-created kits available to be applied to them. This would make the "classes" in the PHB into kits that could be applied to the main class.

For example, there would be a generic Warrior class, with basic minimum abilities with certain number of perks and abilities that could be selected for the players that wanted to "character build."

For players (and DMs) that preferred quicker character generation, a kit could instead be selected to be applied to the Warrior class. The kits would include Fighter (professional fighting-man, abilities reflecting military training in tactics, strategy, possibly including perks from the Myrmidon kit for example), Paladin, Ranger, Barbarian, Cavalier, Archer, Berzerker, etc. For kits that have alignment/role-play restrictions like Paladin and Ranger, characters who violate them would become Warriors without some of the kit benefits.

Some kits could have prerequisites and allow them to be selected after first level if the character doesn't initially meet the prerequisites, sort of like prestige classes in 3e.

I'm not sure what would be done with the XP tables under such a system. It would probably be best to have a single unified XP table for each class group (all Warriors use the same XP table, etc.) and make sure all kits are balanced against each other and the XP table.

 

[delericho]

Things would have been much more logical if the class groupings actually were basic classes (that could be player customized) and alternatively having the pre-created kits available to applied to them. This would make the "classes" in the PHB into kits that could be applied to the main class.

Interesting approach...

I'm not sure what would be done with the XP tables under such a system. It would probably be best to have a single unified XP table for each class group (all Warriors use the same XP table, etc.) and make sure all kits are balanced against each other and the XP table.

In all honesty, I think a single unified XP table for all classes really is the right way to go. Balancing the classes by allowing them to level at a different rate seems like a good idea, but it fails somewhat when one considers that there is no way to know just how many XP the DM gives out each time. Sure, on average the Wizard will be behind the Warrior for 5% of the time, but in actual practice there is no guarantee of that.

Also, in the particular case of 2nd Ed, it really didn't help that the Mage's XP costs suddenly went down just as they were getting access to their more powerful spells!

No, I think 3e got that one right.

 

[kitsune9]

Core 2e was decent

I didn't mind Core 2e as a ruleset. I didn't think there was enough rules like the attempt that 3e did, because there was just too many situations where my players argued a lot. I don't remember what as I no longer have those books anymore so I can't offer specifics.

I did get the vibe for a more "story" kind of 2e as opposed to 1e being a more "dungeon-crawl" kind of D&D (if anyone got this kind of vibe). So in 2e I was definitely wanting more hacking and less yacking.

 

[gizmo33]

My least favorite 2e element were priest spell spheres. Neat idea, but horrible execution. The basically took the spell lists from 1e and just ported them without seemingly any review of power or theme. Nature spells, like reflecting pool, became merged with other redundant divination spells, for example.

The removal of demons/devils, and the basic movement away from Medieval Christian and Occult elements IMO was part of a general trend away from historical/mythological and towards more fantasy/sci-fi/Disney. IMO it started in 1e with Dragonlance, so it wasn't a 2e thing per-se, but 2e was a major rules revision and I think it coincided with this new culture change. More He-Man and less Conan. Seems to me like in the early days of DnD, the audience was conceived of as college or older, and with 2e it was younger. The nudity in the early rulebooks I think is the most obvious example that takes the least analysis, but not the only example of this change. The only way a "bohemian earspoon" would ever be mentioned in a new rulebook would be as an homage to 1e - the new style is axe-heads 50 times too big for the haft, dire flails, and other implausible and cartoonish elements.

So my negative feeling about 2e has as much to do with the culture as the rules.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

We played first with a fair amount of house rules, and material from Dragon Magazine. When 2nd Ed came out, we read through them, and many things we houseruled out were still in, and things that we liked were taken out (sub classes, demons, devils, monks ect).

All in all, our houseruled 1st ed was a better game for us than 2nd. So we just skipped it - we didn't buy a single rulebook. We did buy the Spelljammer stuff for setting, but used our rules to play it.