Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="TerraDave" data-source="post: 4594441" data-attributes="member: 22260">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.</blockquote>

Verification