What were the design goals of 2nd edition?

[TerraDave]

In his 'Col Pladoh' thread here, Mr Gygax made it pretty clear that what he intended for 2E and what was done were different things.

Also: whose speculating?

 

[Stoat]

This makes me wonder. I've purchased the 1E & 2E Core Rules pdfs from rpgnow and admit that the game looks fairly interesting.

I'd be curious if anyone has ever undertaken the endeavor of taking the cleaned up rules from 2E and enginerring them to work with 1E. I wonder what that would look like.

I don't really think it's an endeavor to be undertaken. 2E is very much backward compatible with 1E. You could pretty much take any 1E module and run it with the 2E rules without any conversion at all.

 

[Stoat]

This makes me wonder. I've purchased the 1E & 2E Core Rules pdfs from rpgnow and admit that the game looks fairly interesting.

I'd be curious if anyone has ever undertaken the endeavor of taking the cleaned up rules from 2E and enginerring them to work with 1E. I wonder what that would look like.

I don't really think it's an endeavor to be undertaken. 2E is very much backward compatible with 1E. You could pretty much take any 1E module and run it with the 2E rules without any conversion at all.

 

[JeffB]

Zeb has a Q&A thread over at Dragonsfoot. You can go ask him there (and he may in fact have already answered a similar question to this, I cannot recall off-hand)

 

[MerricB]

I don't really think it's an endeavor to be undertaken. 2E is very much backward compatible with 1E. You could pretty much take any 1E module and run it with the 2E rules without any conversion at all.

Funnily enough, one series you couldn't run as-written was the giant series; giants got a huge power-up in 2e, which I don't feel (in retrospect) was a good idea.

Cheers!

 

[joethelawyer]

I remember my 2e years as being extremely fun. 2e -- from 89 to 99 -- exactly overlaid my years in high school and college (with a year added on either end). It will always be the D&D of my adolescence.

Earlier, we played 1e and BD&D extensively, and every one of us transplanted whole to 2e. Now granted, when this transition occurred, we were all of 14 years old.

I think age in general has a great deal to do with the enjoyment of any game. My friends and I were not interested in game balance, mechanical subsystems, metaplot, rules bloat, or power creep. And it wasn't even as if we were aware of those things but chose to ignore them. We didn't even know that the terms existed, much less what they meant.

For example, THAC0 made perfect sense to us. We never questioned its strangeness, and indeed we were never aware that it was strange. It was just the rules. When BAB appeared in 3e, it was easy for me to look back in hindsight at THAC0 and view it with disdain. The simple elegance of BAB was so self-evident, it was one of those *slaps forehead* moments. But hell if my 14 year-old self could have thought of that when THAC0 was predominant.

But least of all amongst our tribulations was the awareness of (and subsequent striving for) balance. It just didn't matter. Concept was the all-important factor when choosing class and race. Yes, like everyone else in the world playing at the time, when we got our grubby hands on the Complete Book of Elves, we all wanted desperately to play the bladesinger kit. So one of us did, and he was super-cool, and rampaged through combat, and the rest of the group said "neat-o!" when he did something awesome. But the rest of the party members were cool, too, even though they were (in hindsight, mind) severely underpowered.

This attitude stemmed from the whole "ignorance is bliss" thing. Once again, being young and naive, we didn't view the bladesinger as overpowered, and the product of power creep over the years. It was just cool. Full stop. It didn't stop other players from wanting to play a plain old fighter, I can assure you.

We were also blissfully unaware of corporate machinations at TSR. What did we care? We worshipped Gygax as the creator of the game and the author of some of our favorite adventures and supplements from 1e, and that's where it ended. We knew he had left TSR only because none of the 2e products had his name on them. It certainly didn't sour us on the game, though. To use an extreme (yet true) example: we had just as much fun playing the 2e FR Avatar Trilogy of adventures (Shadowdale, Tantras, Waterdeep) as we did playing the 1e Temple of Elemental Evil (by Gygax). Yes, you read that correctly.

Our enjoyment of the Avatar Trilogy came primarily from our youthful naivete, of course. I'm sure that if I attempted to run that for my present-day group (all consisting of 30-somethings), we would recoil in horror like everyone else.

All this is not me trying to find an excuse for 2e's shortcomings in game design and motivations. Viewed through the prism of adulthood, extensive play of 3e, 4e, and a multitude of other games, it is easy to see the faults in 2e. I'm sure adults playing 2e back in the 90's found the faults easily, as well. But I wasn't an adult at the time. If I put myself into the mindset of what it was like to play 2e, one word comes to mind: fun.

ditto to everything you said man (except the avatar trilogy thing). i could not have said that any better in describing my own feelings towards the game and the era.

 

[Remathilis]

Perhaps the greatest loss was the written tone throughout the game was changed from Gygax writing to his PEERS to one of a company explaining the game to KIDS. It made it nigh-impossible to respect the improvements that were made.

That, IMHO, was a problem.

AD&D 1e assumed (perhaps rightly) that you entered D&D via the Basic (B/X) game, most likely via an experienced DM showing you how to play before you branched off into DMing. So the DMG is written not as rulebook but as a running commentary; something of a higher-level text explaining the game and gaming to someone who probably learned the simple rules earlier and probably practiced them many times via multiple D&D sessions.

That was great when the game was spread mostly word-of-mouth. However, as D&D began to spread from the hobby shops to the bookstores, a game that teaches itself was more in line. 2e tried this by clairifying rules and trying to explain things better. 3e did a better job of trying to teach itself; 4e is the easiest yet.

While some may laud the loss of Gygax's "higher" discourse, I think a game should be easy and simple to reach the greatest possible audience.

 

[Nikosandros]

The decisions behind 2e balance were much more arbitrary than the decisions that went into future editions.

I agree. And yet, despite having a lot of fun with 3e and 4e, AD&D will always be my favorite version of D&D.

It's certainly true that several design decisions behind 2e were informed by an anti-Gygax corporate culture at TSR, but at least they tried to update the game without creating a wholly new one.

AD&D could have used a lot of clean up, but that could have been done without creating a very different game... compare the changes from AD&D to 3e (or from 3e to 4e for that matter) with the changes from GURPS 3e to 4e.

 

[Korgoth]

Why not let the 2E PHB speak for itself?

"Things that did work haven‘t been changed."

Wow... what a backward, paleolithic design philosophy!

 

[Orius]

Oh, there was plenty of imbalance in 2e. Some splatbooks were huge powerups (Elves). Some told you that the PHB classes were too good and that you should cripple them (Priests). Psionics was a clunky addon system that didn't work with the existing game. Dual-wielding was pure combat cheese. From what I've heard, a lot of the supplements were authored by freelancers with no real oversight (in terms of playtesting or coordination), so while there's a lot of awesome ideas to be found, the mechanics are terribly uneven.

That's where I think 2e kind of fell off the wagon. First off, there was no real unified vision behind what 2e should be beyond a cleanup of 1e rules. So as 2e developed, it developed just as haphazardly as 1e did. Then the generic 2e stuff like the splats were often freelanced, while the creative staff was doing the campaign settings, which leads to the next point:

Story time? To their credit, the core stuff didn't do too much of this, but otherwise the success of DL cast a long shadow. There was a big ramp up in flavour text, everyone became a novelist, and most of what came out...not so great (with some exceptions)...and its hard not to believe that the crunchy side didn't suffer.

This also contributed to 2e's eventual problems. According to a lot of the background on campaign settings in Dragon #315 (or whichever one it was in early 3.5 with all the classic campaign goodies), the whole push toward settings was to copy DL's success. So basically management wanted to make a heap of money like they did with DL, because they were afraid DL would eventually run out of steam. They didn't know how to do that exactly though, so they had the creative staff continually churn out new settings with game products, novels, and so on. Only FR really seemed to do it as expected, and while many of the settings were creative, they just split up the user base in a way that became unprofitable.