I'd given up on 2e years before, so maybe they miraculously fixed all the problems they'd initially kept from 1e, and introduced in complete & 'option' series books. Or, more likely, we just have very different assessments of that edition.
If you didn't even look at the options stuff, I think your opinion of 2E as getting worse and worse is a bit unfair. We may well have different assessments, but mine is based on a vastly more complete picture, because, much to my own surprise, we kept playing it.
2E was on a steady upswing since about 1994, and it pretty much kept getting better, with some swings into slightly silly territory or bad in the odd individual book. The initial setup of 2E was, I can admit, somewhat unpromising, yes carrying over a lot of 1E's flaws (though also ditching a lot), and a lot of the early material was a mixture of genius (Taladas, FRA), and godawful (I'm not going to start that fight).
We actually all had abandoned 2E by about 1993 (Dark Sun notwithstanding) for a while, because other RPGs were more interesting, particularly Earthdawn, which seemed like an attempt to solve more or less every major flaw in D&D, took over (we also played WoD stuff alongside D&D/ED/etc). But then Planescape happened, and then Combat & Tactics and so on, and D&D managed to get us playing again, and importantly, to stay fun, stay interesting. You got totally amazing things as well, like the spell and magic item compendiums, which compiled and revised (to a limited extent) essentially every single spell/magic item from 1E and 2E, which I can tell you, was a crazy amount of naughty word.
I'd say most of the worst stuff in 2E happened, again, fairly early on, and that was largely a wacky overabundance of settings and setting material and so on.
So I can't fit the "got too much stuff and exploded so it had to be rebooted" model to that.
It's not entirely wrong, but it does ignore the pernicious effects that bloat had on the Tier 2-5 classes and other existing options - including, perhaps ironically, occasionally elevating them a bit, but you missed out on it if you didn't keep up with the latest.
FWIW.
Sure, but it wasn't just the T1 stuff being bad - it was that the early sourcebooks had most of the most "broken" Feats and PRCs. You talk about bloat, but whilst it elevated casters a bit further, they generally weren't taking stuff from the later books if they were looking to be powerful.
That's a plus or a strike against it, relative to PF2, depending on whether you want an adequate system more than fear a bloated one.
I definitely don't fear bloat. Honestly 30 years of TT RPGs and I have yet to see a game I ran or played in ruined by bloat other than Rifts, because virtually all games are designed in a sufficiently modular way. Most games that have problems, start with those problems, or acquire them very early on.
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Yeah, that's a shallow aesthetic philosophy, that appeals to a certain mindset. It's not a fact, nor is it the be-all and end-all of design. Minimalism has it's place, but this is not that place, and deeply condescending statements like:
Most options aren't needed. You just think you need them.
Should be treated only one way - with a dismissive eye-roll and a sigh. Arguing against needless complexity is one thing. It's been a common problem in the history of RPGs. Arguing that other people are too dim to know whether they want complexity, however, is, um, not great.
"You think you want it, but you don't."
J. Allen Brack
Actually it turned out they did.
Hero System stands as a strong example. You can create anything in Hero, using, say, the 4th ed 'BBB' or HSR - a single book, at release, that you can in any edition of D&D, or RuneQuest, or any other setting or game you can think of - complete with system artifacts, like armor deflecting attacks rather than reducing damage, if you really want to - it's complex, it's not perfectly balanced (though much better-balanced than any edition of D&D, that's just stepping over a bar buried deep under ground), it's decidedly susceptible to system mastery, but it's quite robust, playable, and can handle content expansion without adding (or 'breaking,' if you prefer) rules.
It also never sold very well, because, well, once you have that core system, you don't need much else.
Oh Tony, I'm so sorry. Hero System didn't fail to sell well because "you didn't need much else". Plenty of games like that sold well. Hero System failed because it reduced anything you tried to play in it to
totally flavourless mush.
The main thing is was utterly terrible at was superheroes. Yeah, I went there. It was totally awful at superheroes. It turned these mythical, exciting beings in giant bags of numbers, where everything had to precisely, elaborately and tediously quantified using a system far better suited to a quasi-realist SWAT vs Terrorists-type game than anything else.
And whatever you tried to play with it, and we tried plenty of different things, because we had the pig-headed idea for a year or two that universal systems were where it was all going, where it had to go, it felt exactly the same - like some weirdly precise, slow, detailed, and fundamentally uninteresting system that was totally failing to match up to the fantasy it was supposed to be matching up with. You had to work SO hard and it still felt like something that wasn't the superhero genre.
Marvel FASERIP was a hundred times the "supers" game Hero/Champions was (GURPS was arguably even worse at supers, I'll give you that). Every fantasy system that I played was a better fantasy system than Hero. It was kind of okay at some kinds of sci-fi, I guess?
Hero really just finished off the whole idea of "you only need one system" for my group. We thought GURPS just had issues and wasn't properly designed for some stuff, and that Hero would fix it but nah, it proved, hard-proved that the system profoundly influences how a game feels, and can really alter how you interact with it. It murdered the idea that you can play any setting with any system and have a good result.
That is the end of my Hero system rant. Ooof.
