What were the problems with 2nd ed?

[Derro]

Oh
* There are no hand-to-hand combat rules if you're not a Monk. Wait, there were no Monks in 2E.

I gotta call you on this. There was a unarmed strike/wrestling table on the PHB combat section. Primitive by today's standards but did have flavorable desciptors like rabbit punch, haymaker, and bear hug (3 + Strength bonus damage!!!).

The priest splat also featured a monk variant with unarmed combat rules. But that's a splat.

Magic items were not all that rare if you used the treasure you see in modules as an example; usually it was chock full of magic items. Mainly because unlike 3E, many monsters in 2E are invulnerable to weapons that are not over a certain '+' value.

The abundance of magic items was less of a problem than their unbalanced nature. They did have a scale of sorts but were often over-powered in some weird way or particularly useless. Especially when it came to items that had multiple functions.

2e's biggest downfall was incoherence. Even the core rules (PHB, DMG, MM) contradicted themselves in some cases and once the splats were introduced it was a downward spiral from there. The Player's Option revisions attempted to make some things more coherent and even introduced elements present in 3e (AoO, unified combat maneuvers, etc.) but that stuff was really a last stab for a dying system.

The best thing that can be said about 2e is that it was a much more open game. There were less rules you had to follow to make the game playable. This openness was also one of its worst qualities because it gave rise to easy power-gaming and munchkinism. The GM had to have a much heavier hand to make 2e work but if everybody had a similar vision it sometimes did.

I would not play 2e again but I do recognize it as a watermark for D&D. It's just a watermark for both good and bad qualities.

 

[an_idol_mind]

When 3rd edition came out, I saw two big improvements over 2nd edition.

First, there was the unified mechanic. That made it much easier to explain to new players how the game was played. In addition, a lot of other rules bits were cleaned up. For example, ability scores went to using a universal modifier rather than a number of different tables.

Second, there was an increase in character options. This was a big one for me. My biggest problem with 2nd edition, or most previous editions for that matter, was the fact that the core system had some arbitrary restrictions stuck into it. 2nd edition got past these options by introducing kits and later the Skills & Powers supplement, which quickly led to rules overload on my part. The introduction of feats and a better multiclassing system allowed for more customization with fewer supplements, which was immensely useful.

 

[Grand_Director]

Man oh man...initiative. I remember when word got out that initiative was rolled once before combat and the player retained that result for the entire fight there was pandemonium. My group was ready to house rule it sight unseen. Man, we were wrong.

Whenever I get nervous about 4e it's things like this that help me stay grounded and open minded.

 

[wingsandsword]

2e Psionics was horribly broken.

It had lots of mind-affecting abilities that were things like being dominated no-save. You couldn't save vs. pretty much any telepathic effect, you had to have a psionic defense yourself (which only psionicists and a tiny number of wild talents had).

You could throw Disintegrate effects at 3rd level if you were a psychokinetic. The only downside was that if you ever rolled a 20 trying to activate the power you had to save or be disintegrated yourself.

You could teleport a small army starting at 3rd level as well if you were psychoportive (with the Wormhole science).

If you ever complain about 3e or 3.5 psionics, go back and look at 2e and be thankful for what we have.

 

[rossik]

I gotta call you on this. There was a unarmed strike/wrestling table on the PHB combat section. Primitive by today's standards but did have flavorable desciptors like rabbit punch, haymaker, and bear hug (3 + Strength bonus damage!!!).

The priest splat also featured a monk variant with unarmed combat rules. But that's a splat.

.

also, you have the ninjas handbook for some oriental martial arts.


i have to admit that the 3ed thing "higher is better" (about dice rolling) is easier to teach people.

i didnt like how kits works, very unbalanced (like priest "pacifist" and elf "bladesinger")

have no problem about so many worlds. lots of fun choices!

the skill points is a little odd, as fighetr had the best combination of non-weapon and weapon

 

[MichaelK]

Death and dying rules are a lot harsher. Hit 0 hp? You're dead.

This is why the 2nd edition PHB has the "Waiting at Death's door" rule which lets you go to -10 hit points. Yes it's marked as an optional rule, but so is everything in the PHB. Everyone I know uses this optional rule and 3rd edition simply removed the optional tag from it.

 

[escaflowne777]

Amen the original post. 2nd edition makes me feel like I can actually pay attention to the story instead of worrying if this thing can grapple me or not. I played 2nd Ed as a kid, and now, yeah, I do play 3.5, but it cant be helped, everyone does. 4th makes me uneasy, because I feel like dnd is moving farther away from story and closer to world of warcraft on paper. Also, someone said that spells were overpowered in 2nd Ed? Spells were actually useful in 2nd edition for something other than just damage. Also, bards were functional. I'm afraid to ask, but how many people here have had bard syndrome? Also know as, "do whatever the other party members want you to."

 

[withak]

This is why the 2nd edition PHB has the "Waiting at Death's door" rule which lets you go to -10 hit points. Yes it's marked as an optional rule, but so is everything in the PHB. Everyone I know uses this optional rule and 3rd edition simply removed the optional tag from it.

This is news to me. Obviously, my group doesn't use it, at least not as written. Would have been handy a few sessions ago, when the DM had to fudge damage rolls to prevent himself from killing a PC he didn't mean to...

 

[EATherrian]

This is why the 2nd edition PHB has the "Waiting at Death's door" rule which lets you go to -10 hit points. Yes it's marked as an optional rule, but so is everything in the PHB. Everyone I know uses this optional rule and 3rd edition simply removed the optional tag from it.

They also had the nice optional rule that if you are healed while between -1 and -10 any healing only brings you up to 1 hp and you're useless the rest of the day. I love that rule, and I'm not being sarcastic. It made death's door much more feared and dangerous which I think it should be.

 

[jdrakeh]

• Roll high to hit, roll high to save, roll low for Attribute checks, roll a different die type to use crippled skills (and crippled skills). The was no AD&D system. Every little bit of the game required a different kind of die rolling for no good reason. This made the learning curve higher than it needed to be for hobby newcomers (and also accounted for why so many groups handwaved the beejeesus out of it, rather than bothering to use the rules as written).
  
  
• The rolling high to hit was not just rolling high to hit but, also, calculating an extremely unintuitive mathematic formula (THAC0). Even cross-referencing charts was preferable to calculating THAC0 in my experience. The idea behind THAC0 was sound, though the implementation was horrid.
  
  
• No real skill system. You had options for secondary skills and such but they were poorly defined, lacked a breadth of choice, and ultimately were a disaster of game design. So much so that I don't think I ever played with a single group that used them in actual play. If they had wanted to add skills as an option, they should have just added skills, not one-off nebulous abilities that sort of mimicked skills but only made sense with a lot of handwaving.
  
  
• The removal of races and classes considered to be "standard" D&D by that time (Assassins, Half-orcs, etc). Sure, the changes were justified in official settings, but since most people I knew didn't play in official settings, this justification was worthless. The lack of those races and classes just meant that a lot of people playing in campaigns that contained them stuck with the AD&D 1e rules.