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

[WheresMyD20]

Checking my 2e PHB, fireballs, lightning bolts, etc. cap at 10d6. Perhaps this was a byproduct of a hybrid 1e/2e game?

You're right. I forgot about the cap. The group I played in didn't use the damage caps for spells.

Still, any spell with a level variable will be more powerful if cast by a bard than if cast by a mage with an equal amount of experience points. This distortion gets very noticeable in high-level games when the bard needs 220,000 xp per level and a mage needs 375,000 xp.

 

[the Jester]

By core rules, I mean the PHB, MM, and DMG.

I don't mean the crappy splat books, the ridiculous amount of campaign setting books, the lousy quality of the binding of the core hardcover books, the dumb decision to use a looseleaf MM, the removal of demons and devils and going all politically correct, T's business strategies or legal tactics at the time, or any of the other stuff that came out or happened in the era of 2e. I mean just the basic 2e rules. What was so bad about them?

Well sure, other than the crappy stuff, 2e was fine, but so was every edition.

You actually exclude most of the reasons that people dislike 2e- and several of them are straight up core issues: crappy binding, demons and devils and the loss of all the flavor (i.e. going politically correct). Though it doesn't seem as though binding is a core rules issue, the quality (or lack thereof) of the books made a big difference to some people as far as how much they enjoyed the game went.

Now, looking just at the mechanics of 2e, which I think is your question, the core rules were ok. But they lacked a lot of the flavor of 1e without bringing much new/better stuff to the table. The best thing about 2e was the specialty priest- but it took a dm who could balance classes to make them work (ime published specialty priests were rarely well-balanced, mostly because there wasn't much of a baseline to look at; the lack of a few examples, imho, is a 'core rules issue').

I think 2e's problem- the reason it is the stepchild, as you put it- is that it is impossible to avoid comparing it to 1e, which has 67% of the mechanical goodness of 2e while containing 250% the amount of flavor. At the time I remember universal disappointment that the arcane tone of Gygaxian writing had been completely lost. No new words to add to my vocabulary!

 

[mxyzplk]

My group loved 2e and moved straight to it from 1e not looking back (except to use all those great 1e adventures). For us it hit a happy medium. The rules were simple enough you could easily house-rule some, but not need to do it all the time to make anything work. In terms of sheer tonnage, I have more 2e gear than any other edition. I'm not sure you could really call it story-oriented, but it was more conducive to longer campaigns - I ran a single same-characters campaign for 5 years under 2e.

I really liked the further evolution of the changes when 3e initially came out (we had already evolved skills and multiclassing on our own out of necessity), but as it grew it become way too unwieldy. I think the 3e and especially 3.3e splatbooks added way more suck than the 2e splatbooks. People complain about the kits et al. but go back and read them. They're about 1/5 the power of any given 3.5e prestige class, and added some much needed variety.

Recently I tried to play some C&C for that 1e retro experience, and it was just *too* constraining. Every character is just like every other of its class. I got frustrated quickly - a one shot was fine but as we went on I realized it was just not going to be as dynamic as I'd grown used to.

The 2e MM - bad stuff. Book quality I found OK; I had to buy slipcovers to keep my 1e books together. Kicking out Gary - I wasn't into "the scene" so didn't know about any of that. Changing the names of demons/devils - annoying but trivial to ignore.

 

[Orius]

There were cases where books would make references to non-core material, most notably the Tome of Magic, but it's not nearly as bad as some of the anti-2E propaganda would indicate, IIRC.

That's true. Most of the splats had a tendancy to be largely ignored in the system. Most of the time when the splats were mentioned, it seemed to be references to the Theif's Handbook NWPs. The only optional book that seemed to get much use in products was the Tome of Magic, and I suspect most players had that.

The DMG is almost completely useless. Apart from the treasure tables and the lists of magic items, there is nothing of value therein.

The Monstrous Compendium was a good idea in principle, but a total failure in practice. As was mentioned, as soon as loose-leaf sheets contained different monsters on each side, it was impossible to keep them organised, defeating the purpose of the folder. This was, however, massively improved when they replaced the MC with the Monstrous Manual.

I'll agree there. The PHB is pretty good. The MC binder from all I've read was a good idea that was implemented badly; I had only the MM though, so I don't personally know. The DMG was largely useless; while it had treasure and magic item tables, there was little in the way of rules, and mostly Zeb Cook explaining why the rules were a certain way. I found the 3e DMG to be much better.

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.

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.

I think early 2e did a bit of this or at least tried it; the Fighter's Handbook kit took some of this approach, and the Wizard's and Priest's Handbooks definitely did this (heck, they weren't even called the Mage's and Cleric's Handbooks, after all). Thief's Handbook didn't do Rogue though.

i had a theory that overall the core rules were good, and people had a problem with the direction TSR took the game while 2e was out, and people merged their dislike of all of that into a general overall "2e sucked." that theory seems to be right, in reading the responses here.

Never played 1e, but my feel has always been that 2e cleaned up a lot of clutter and organized the original rules, but just wasn't revolutionary enough in the right way to really convince people to switch. It didn't really change or fix some really fundamental rules that were a legacy of the earliest days of the game, but worked poorly together (i.e., exceptional strength, no unified resolution with attacks, saves, NWPs, etc working differently unlike 3e's d20 system). I think some early rejection of 1e may have been a reaction against Gary's departure, and some of what happened with 1e in the last few years before the new edition.

I also preferred the revised 2nd edition look. It was very attractive and easy to read.

Well, the books orginally were only printed with 2 colors, blue and black, with the occasional color plate. Otherwise, the layout was ok. But the revised books look a lot better, I have the revised DMG and it looks more consistant with the PO books than the PHB and ToM does. The revised 2e books are the best looking books I have in my library; the older 2e hardbacks were pretty bland, and I don't like 3e's look as much.

 

[rogueattorney]

There were 14 Monster Manual monsters in vol. 2 of the Monstrous Compendium which included eels, nagas, sharks, shreikers, sphinxes, violet fungi, and yellow molds.

Um... No.

Here's just a brief list of some of the Monster Manual monsters that were in MC2...

Ankheg
Basilisk
Bulette
Doppleganger
Dryad
Dwarf
Ettin
Gargoyle
Gorgon
Griffin
Hellhound
Hippogriff
Ki-rin
Mermen
Mold, Yellow
Nagas
Otyugh
Roc
Roper
Sahughin
Stirge
Xorn

 

[Prisoner6]

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.

I think you've really hit the nail on the head here. AD&D was written for adults, or at very least people with brains. 2E was seriously dumbed down. It was softer, cuddly, and fluffy. It didn't have that hard edge that AD&D had.

There were a few rule changes that were improvements, but their weren't a lot of improvements.

Instead a bunch of 1E material (monks, barbarians, half-orcs, etc.) were gone! So basically, they pulled some material out, added a couple of useful rules and a few useless rules, and then packaged everything up all cutsie - so it was clearly a *children's* game.

Addendum:
Having said all that, the *good* things about 2E were not in the core. Planescape, Darksun, and Ravenloft campaign settings were amazing!

 

[Gentlegamer]

I think early 2e did a bit of this or at least tried it; the Fighter's Handbook kit took some of this approach, and the Wizard's and Priest's Handbooks definitely did this (heck, they weren't even called the Mage's and Cleric's Handbooks, after all). Thief's Handbook didn't do Rogue though.

Yeah, it was a lost opportunity to systematize it more strongly (class/kit structure) as part of the core rules.

Well, the books orginally were only printed with 2 colors, blue and black, with the occasional color plate. Otherwise, the layout was ok. But the revised books look a lot better, I have the revised DMG and it looks more consistant with the PO books than the PHB and ToM does. The revised 2e books are the best looking books I have in my library; the older 2e hardbacks were pretty bland, and I don't like 3e's look as much.

I agree. The revised 2e books are the best looking books in my library, too.

 

[kenmarable]

I don't get that bit either and my response to it is...so? Sometimes you want high numbers other times you want low. What's the problem?

You want interest rates to be high when you have money witting in the bank and making the interest for you, but do you want them high or low when you are making payments on a loan?

So yeah, sometimes low numbers are good and sometimes high numbers are good. Its just how the world works. I think some players I met just couldn't accept it with AC and such because it didn't fit their mold of the real world, I know one couldn't and preferred to watch people play any D&D, than playing himself because he just couldn't "get it". So it may be acceptance of how it is for THAC0 negative AC being better, and 5 saves/etc that have different system.

I think you miss my point. It isn't that they disagreed with it or thought it was a bad system, it's just that for someone who has never gamed before, there is a lot of rules to learn. Having a "sometimes you want to roll high, sometimes you want to roll low" system makes that learning curve steeper than it needs to be. Of course, someone completely not playing because of it is a wee bit of an overreaction. Thankfully it never kept anyone away from any game I was in, just used up a lot more time than we should have explaining and re-explaining while people learned.

Of course, just to rant for a minute, having gamed a long time with and without THAC0 and seeing the value of 3.0 and on's "always roll high", I say it is bad design. The roll of the dice is a simple randomness tool. It's not modeling anything in the real world other than maybe "luck". It's a random number generator, and a system where sometimes you want high random numbers and sometimes you want low random numbers detracts from the system with more complexity and steepening of the learning curve far, far more than it adds to the system. More game time was lost introducing new players to 2e than to 3e and that is not good. (However, first PC creation took far longer in 3e, so it's a trade off, but at least that didn't eat into actual play time.)

After all, just what is the benefit of wanting different random numbers?

Should I tell my kids when playing Chutes and Ladders, that if they start on a white square, then move the number of spaces they roll, and if they start on a blue square they subtract what they roll from 7 and move that many? After all, that's how numbers are in the real world (and they can get some math practice). I'm sure they would "house rule" that out as quick as possible because it's pointless and adds unnecessary complexity! I'm exaggerating, of course, but in both cases the dice don't model anything - they are just a randomness mechanic to add some fun and variation into the game. That randomness mechanic should be kept as simple as possible in my opinion.

Sorry, not sure where that rant came from. Guess it's my final goodbye to THAC0 and 2e's wacky saving throws that I've been keeping inside for years.

 

[Desdichado]

By core rules, I mean the PHB, MM, and DMG.

I don't mean the crappy splat books, the ridiculous amount of campaign setting books, the lousy quality of the binding of the core hardcover books, the dumb decision to use a looseleaf MM, the removal of demons and devils and going all politically correct, T's business strategies or legal tactics at the time, or any of the other stuff that came out or happened in the era of 2e. I mean just the basic 2e rules. What was so bad about them?

Well, you just got rid of the most prominent complaints about 2e. "Except for a, b, c, x, y and z, what was so bad about 2e?"

Well, nothing, I guess. But you can't just ignore a, b, c, x, y and z.

 

[Nebulous]

I loved 2e. I never really quite understood any of the hate directed at it, but at the time, i was unaware that were alternatives to Fantasy roleplaying. To this day i still haven't tried a whole lot.

For a while there, when the media was really down on D&D and playing up the "satanic" aspect, i had to switch to Runequest to appease my Mom. But i started adding in so many D&D houserules that over time i was just playing D&D anyway.