What were your 2e houserules?

[Voadam]

XP in 2nd edition:

What were the official rules, anyways? I remember individual awards, but they where just to fiddly to use for long. Monster awards were still to low to really on by themselves. Even kicking in a massive amount of story and role-playing awards, advancement was slow....

Speaking of which, I used the optional rule of requiring demihumans to get twice as much XP as humans for a level, as an alternate to level limits. It meant (until you got to the top of the XP chart) that they where about 1 level behind.

In any case, Galen the Dwarf priest of war was played so long, and advanced so slowly.

I recall 2nd ed xp for monsters defeated being much more generous than 1e and a generally faster rate of advancement. Individual xp awards and story awards were there as well.

In 1e everyone got xp for treasure though while in 2e only rogues did.

I forget if you got xp for gaining magic items in either though.

 

[Ron]

I wrote an extensive document years ago in collaboration with two other players. It is lost now but I recall the main points:

• Standard ability scores taken from D&D
• Short round duration taken from D&D
• Some spells, such as Fly, were deleted from game
• Many spells were moved to higher level, in special the divination ones because they spoil any mysterious plot
• Relaxed limitations regarding weapons

As you can see, the old B/X boxes were a source of inspiration as they have a clear edge over AD&D in some points.

 

[Geron Raveneye]

Heh, from the top of my head, not THAT many...

- Multi-classing and dual-classing were more liberated, available for anybody as long as it fit the class concept.

- Non-weapon proficiencies were done according to the "Back in the Saddle" article from some Dragon issue I can't remember right now.

- Elves (and gnomes, I think) got the ability to buy 1st level spells from wizard and druid spell lists as non-weapon proficiencies at 1st level only (1 NWP point per spell level, not more total spell levels than Wisdom modifier, no chance of increasing the score after the first buy).

Apart from that, there wasn't that much on houserules I recall. Damn, it's so long ago already...

Oh, right...one more thing...

- Spontaneous casting for priests, since I was always using specialty priests with spell lists individually combined for each deity in question. Enabled me to be more generous with the casting when the priest had a more limited spell selection.

 

[Orius]

Now that I'm thinking about it, one of the oddities of 2e was that, at first, Necromancy was a pretty weak school without a great variety of spells. So the Complete Wizard's Handbook rectified this by adding more spells...then Tome of Magic also rectified it by adding more spells...then of course there was the Complete Book of Necromancers...by the end of it I think there must have been more Necromancy spells than any other school.

Well, Transmutation was the largest school, just check the school tables in the Wizard's Spell Compendium, Transmutation is HUGE is 2e. But yeah, lots of suppliments added Necromancy spells. They might have been farily weak early on, but once you get to the end of 2e, the wizards of the Black Academy in Return to the Tomb of Horros had some truely nasty spells (since their lists dipped into ToM, and CWH, and CBoN, etc. and had new spells on top of it).

 

[Fenes]

Then, for my last ever 2nd Edition campaign I ran the game from the core rulebooks without any house rules (that I recall). It worked surprisingly well.

I can echo this. Our last campaign in 2E did this as well, until we converted the campaign to 3E once we had the first PHBs.

 

[glass]

I also had max HP at first. Was this not an official rule by that point?

Oh you're right, it wasn't. We did that too (everybody did, didn't they?)



glass.

 

[glass]

I forget if you got xp for gaining magic items in either though.

You got it for making them, in 2e at least (I never played 1e).


glass.

 

[DaveyJones]

...for those of you that played 2e, obviously.

Dunno why, but something made me dig out my 2e PHB and leaf through it, which in turn made me remember just how many houserules I had back in the day.

last one to arrive buys the pizza.

if you drink the last beer you are doing the beer run.

no smoking inside

take the trash out with you when the game session is over

 

[FickleGM]

I started DMing a sub-group of our main group who wanted to play in a RAW game, since the DM of the main group had house-ruled his game so much that it required a full three-ring binder to play (each player got one and it was basically a mishmash of the 1e PHB/1e UA/2e PHB and his elaborate house rules). The rules were not player friendly, which is why some of us wanted to play RAW.

During my years of playing 2e, I can't remember any important house rules, but we did make extensive use of the Player's Option series.

By comparison, I use six house rules when I run 3.5e.

 

[Geron Raveneye]

Oh you're right, it wasn't. We did that too (everybody did, didn't they?)

Heh, nope.