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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eryndur" data-source="post: 4681932" data-attributes="member: 2910">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.</blockquote>

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