NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="withak" data-source="post: 4120498" data-attributes="member: 56493">I actually play 2e currently -- not by choice, mind you, but a game with friends is a good time regardless of system or edition. It's the edition everyone knows reasonably well, and the group owns tons of 2e books. Truth be told, we have a lot of fun despite the system. I hope to convince everyone to try 4e sooner or later, when it's my turn to DM.My character is a 6th-level dwarf cleric. When the fights are tough, he's a healbot. When they're not, he's a suboptimal melee combatant.Random thoughts, off the top of my head...Death and dying rules are a lot harsher. Hit 0 hp? You're dead. Our DMs have houseruled this to make characters below 6th level less death-prone by adding negative hit point rules, but once you hit 6th level, you can no longer go negative. Suddenly, Mr. Cleric is much more important, and since I can't do any spontaneous casting, I basically fill up on healing spells.We're constantly asking each other "Do I want to roll high, or low, here?" It's a source of constant confusion.There are fewer hard-and-fast rules for skill adjudication, which leads to a lot of inconsistency. Add to this a horrid house rule: the Perception score, rolled at character creation. A single d20 determines how perceptive your character is, forever. Our scout-type characters -- the ranger and the thief -- have perception scores of 4 and 2, respectively. Needless to say, we get surprised and ambushed a lot. (Not to mention lost, because our ranger also sucks at tracking.)Only the thief and ranger have thief-style skills readily available, and they use a wacky percentage-based, conditional system. Want to hide or sneak as a cleric? Better hope the situation is right and the DM's feeling accommodating.Saving throw categories are seemingly arbitrary, based off of the type of item or creature that produced the effect. There are five categories (from memory): Breath Weapon, Death Magic, Poison, Rod/Staff/Wand, and... Spell?There are different XP tables for each class. (The unified progression, along with the unified d20 + modifier mechanic, were the 'Hallelujah!' moments for me when 3e was released.) XP is handed out not only for combat, but also for various class-based goals, which, while a nice idea, leads to a lot of disparity in advancement.The spells, and how they work, are a lot more hodgepodge and arbitrary. In 3e, you can give a spell a quick glance and know basically how it works, for the most part. There are some 2e spells that require several readings to decipher.Initiative is rolled anew every round. In theory, this makes for more dynamic combat. In practice, it bogs things down significantly, and causes a lot of confusion. Weapons have "speeds" which affect initiative, as do casting times on spells.THAC0. Ick. The mechanic is unintuitive, and the progression charts are nonsensical.Percentile strength. Ick. Only a Warrior class (Fighter, Ranger, Paladin) can have "exceptional" strength, and there are various categories included in the 18 Strength score based on a single percentile roll.I'm sure I could come up with more. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f615.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":confused:" title="Confused    :confused:"  data-smilie="5"data-shortname=":confused:" /></blockquote>

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