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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 8317405" data-attributes="member: 7026594">I honestly think the 1E initiative system is better in some ways, though it's confusing and can use a few house rules.The Bard revision was great, the specialist Wizards are a cool concept (though a whole additional spell slot per level is BIG; and I rarely remember seeing generalist mages played), and the overall cleanup and clarification of the mechanics was nice.  In several places they really got too conservative, though.  Speciality Priests had cool flavor but were almost always weak compared to a Cleric and kind of a poor choice.  Forbidding elves and half elves from casting in armor was a pretty brutal change.  And switching to 3d6 for ability scores as the default while retaining 1E style ability score bonus charts rather than the B/X or BECMI ones made no sense at all.  Look at the character generation example- how uninspiring was that to kids hoping to play heroes like in the fiction?But in retrospect, IMO, if you already understood 1E, 2E didn't really change enough to merit a whole new edition.  The mandate to make it as reverse-compatible as possible limited the scope of change too much.  And the xp system was fundamentally broken.  They made gold for xp an optional rule without giving adequate guidance on how to replace it.  In practice, from what I saw, most DMs relied heavily on monster xp, which slowed advancement greatly and changed the focus of play in a bad way, more toward hack and slash.  I think the intent was to move more toward quest awards, but little guidance or direction was given on how to award those, how much to give, how fast advancement should be, etc.2E was really stuck in a hard spot trying to retain the loyalty of the older 1E players but also service the players being drawn in by Dragonlance and other fantasy fiction, who wanted to play like the heroes of a fantasy novel.  And IMO the 2E DMG really dropped the ball trying to be all things to all people and failed to really teach the game to new DMs.  While I started with BECMI and 1E, I was around 14 when 2E came out and that was the first edition I could really wrap my head around the rules and try to run.  ...but the 2E DMG was full of "you could do it this way, or you could do it that way" vagueness that made me despair of figuring out one functional way to make it work.  The good DMs I played with (my first serious, multi-month and multi-year campaigns were in 2E) were ones with strong authorial visions and design sensibilities, willing to come up with their own ways of awarding XP, for example.</blockquote>

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