Why all the Second Edition Haters?

[Aries_Omega]

Thoughts on 2E

Actually I been gaming since OD&D and DMing since 2nd Edition. The campaign setting I use has been around since 1E and I inherited it actually when my DM passed on....yes...passed on. Our DM...John did have kids but they had no time for "children's games". He taught all the local kids chess, parcheesi and RP games. His wife gave the oldest kids 1st dibs on stuff. I got his campaign primer....40 pages of text which outlined the valley and surrounding area that we always gamed in. I since them have made an entire world.

My only compalints of 2nd Edition and 1st Edition was how BIG the house rules book was. 2nd Edition was smaller then 1st Edition but now my 3E book is itty bitty. Mostly rules added such as more feats and prestige classes.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I have fond memories of 2e settings and campaigns the DMs ran.

However, the rules... arrgghhh... thanks to 2e I discovered Alternity, and couldn't be made to DM DnD until 3e came out.

I will always reserve a spot for boiling hot bile for 2e's broken psionics system. To this day people are often leery of psionics because the 2e system was so very broken. I'm not talking about about a few broken powers or some seriously broken combos, but something that was busted right out the box.

 

[Prince of Happiness]

I played 2E for quite some time. Looking back, I suppose I never really noticed the rules. Looking at the rules now, I feel a tic and I want to go "stabble stabble." Thinking about it, I'm amazed my friends and I were able to get new players in at all!

However, Al-Qadim knocked my socks off, and I hope there is an official update for this. I enjoyed some of the other settings as well, and I thought Birthright was very well done. Ravenloft, I enjoyed to a point. At some point I started to think "Why am I not playing Call of Cthulhu?"

 

[Graf]

People don't have 2e love fests because the ruleset was crap.

With 1e the whole idea of hiding out in your basement playing make beleive was novel. The people who rave about the system to this day don't seem to think that the quality of a ruleset matters.

There were enough game systems out when 2e was around that the vast majority of people could figure out that there were many different ways to resolve an action using probabilities and 2e's wasn't clear, or useful.

 

[Kalendraf]

I played 1e, and loved it. Then 2e came out and we were faced with upgrading our books for the first time. We grudgingly did so, thinking it was an improvement, though a lot of things seemed to be changed for no real sensible reason.

The assassin and monk were gone. Some lame excuse was provided, but we accepted it and moved on. 2e did add some interesting things with the skills, though it seemed somewhat lacking.

The 2e monstrous compendium, while interesting in theory, turned out to be a DM's nightmare. 3-ring binders were prone to lose the pages and chewed up the edges of the paper as well. Definitely an experiment gone awry.

What turned me off the most was likely the products coming out during the late stages of 2e. Much of it seemed like regurgitated crap that made it seem that TSR was scraping way past the bottom of the barrel to make ends meet.

I kept playing 2e right up until a year after 3e debuted. I tried 3e and fell in love with it immediately. It fixed so many problems from the earlier versions that I wondered why I hadn't switched earlier.

So while I have fond memories of playing games in the 2e timeframe, looking back, I can see lot of problems with the game system, it's packaging and marketing, and realize just how poor it was in comparison.

 

[Aaron L]

Second Edition drove me to First Edition.

I started in '93 playing 2E, played for about 2 years and met a friend who still played 1E. The more I played of 1E the more I wanted to play it instead of 2E. Demons, devils, half orcs? Why were these removed? The more I saw, the more it looked to me that 2E was just 1E with a lot of the soul stripped, leaving the bare bones of the rules (slightly dumbed down) and blandness replacing what was taken out.

 

[Fenes]

I have mixed feelings about 2E. It will always be my first fantasy roleplaying game. I will always fondly remember my first character, a bard, and our first campaign, spanning many years.

Though rules-wise... ugh, double ugh and ugh again. Horribly unbalanced from the get go. Even without the complete books the multiclassing rules made single classes almost obsolete until the highest levels. Stats were much more important for skills than anything else. The kits made it worse. In hindisght, I don't know why it took 3E for me to see how much 2E needed improvements.

Most of all I hated the take on elves. Uber elves all around, even in the fluff parts, who usually were 2Es saving grace. No reason mechanically not to play an elf. (3E has slowly gotten the same problem, a perfect elven subrace for any class...)

Nowadays I DM and play 3E, since my gaming groups don't want to start 3.5E. I like the rules, though I do not see them as "a rule for every situation" - with the d20/DC system and situational modifiers a DM can easily cover most situations with a skill check of some kind, at least I manage to, though I do not have many rules lawyers in my groups.

 

[National Acrobat]

Insanity

2E drove me insane, it was horrible. My group and I just kept playing 1E instead, and still do to this day after experimenting with 3E a bit.

 

[HellHound]

I just... kinda missed 2e.

Didn't pick up the rule books in 1989 when they were released ( I guess I missed the memo ). Then in 1991, the Rules Cyclopedia was released and I bought it and started running classic D&D again instead of 1e.

My classic D&D campaign ran from 1991 until January of 2001, shortly after I received the 3.0 core rules as a Winter Solstice present.

 

[Calico_Jack73]

Most of all I hated the take on elves. Uber elves all around, even in the fluff parts, who usually were 2Es saving grace. No reason mechanically not to play an elf. (3E has slowly gotten the same problem, a perfect elven subrace for any class...).

You are forgetting level limits for demi-human races. That was the mechanic you were looking for. I didn't really agree with it but that was the mechanic they used. I think they should have used an experience point penalty perhaps but not an absolute limit.

I had a blast with 2e but then I was always someone who could make the mechanics invisible and concentrate on the story. I've used every edition of D&D, Paladium, Rolemaster, and Warhammer to tell stories and not worried about the mechanics.