My Experience
My gaming group moved away from AD&D at about the time that the second edition core books came out (1989-90? something like that), so I missed pretty much everything that was 2nd edition - I vaguely remember leafing through the second edition PHB shortly after it came out and thinking 'hmmm some interesting tweaks and revisions here' but not really being inspired to get something going; then the torrent of splat books started to pour and it soon became more hassle than it was worth to try and catch up with the system, so I didn't bother.
My gaming circle came back to D&D when 3rd edition came out as it was a good ruleset for our quick'n'dirty, minimally plotted out, everybody-GMs-a-few-sessions Monday night game and quickly became established as a useful lingua franca system that doesn't impose a learning curve when the GM seat rotates.
Anyway, that's the background. My story concerns a con game I got involved with last autumn. The game was fairly high level AD&D2 and I was a little dubious (since I'd not got any background with the rules) but I figured that I'd played scads of AD&D back in the day so I'd be able to get by.
How wrong I was.
Clearly I was going to be behind the curve on min-maxing my character but I was cool with that - I picked a character without too much complexity (a ranger) and aimed to fit him out as a vanilla human 'mountain man' type, the sort of guy who disapears into back of beyond for a few months and returns with several pack loads of furs to trade for liquor, baccy and steel axeheads. Minimal spellcasting, no racial gotchas or gimmicks to worry about and no fancy-schmancy wandsawonder or stuff. So I cracked the PHB, the Ranger splatbook and got down to cases and by god it was hard work - wierd progressions in the tables, rules and exceptions and special cases all over the first 40 or 50 pages or so, non-weapon proficiencies, kits and so on and on and on...
Now obviously I have recent familiarity with D&D3 and little or none with AD&D2 so a lot of the handling time for this chargen will be down to that, but even so the AD&D2 mechanics are (IMO) just so full of kludges and bizarre cruft as to be unplayable for me (and don't get me started on how TSR could justify the padding and selling the same thing twice that was going on in that Ranger splatbook). Presumably if I went back to my old first edition books I'd encounter the same thing but those are sacrosanct to my teenage self and will remain lovingly (yet securely) locked away in a deep dark box in my deep dark attic.
So *my* nomination for least favourite pre-D&D3 book is the second edition PHB. I've played with it for precisely one session, it has no hallowed memories for me and, compared to my recent gaming with the D&D3.x rulesets, it sucked harder than the hardest vacuum.
Regarsd
Luke
My gaming group moved away from AD&D at about the time that the second edition core books came out (1989-90? something like that), so I missed pretty much everything that was 2nd edition - I vaguely remember leafing through the second edition PHB shortly after it came out and thinking 'hmmm some interesting tweaks and revisions here' but not really being inspired to get something going; then the torrent of splat books started to pour and it soon became more hassle than it was worth to try and catch up with the system, so I didn't bother.
My gaming circle came back to D&D when 3rd edition came out as it was a good ruleset for our quick'n'dirty, minimally plotted out, everybody-GMs-a-few-sessions Monday night game and quickly became established as a useful lingua franca system that doesn't impose a learning curve when the GM seat rotates.
Anyway, that's the background. My story concerns a con game I got involved with last autumn. The game was fairly high level AD&D2 and I was a little dubious (since I'd not got any background with the rules) but I figured that I'd played scads of AD&D back in the day so I'd be able to get by.
How wrong I was.
Clearly I was going to be behind the curve on min-maxing my character but I was cool with that - I picked a character without too much complexity (a ranger) and aimed to fit him out as a vanilla human 'mountain man' type, the sort of guy who disapears into back of beyond for a few months and returns with several pack loads of furs to trade for liquor, baccy and steel axeheads. Minimal spellcasting, no racial gotchas or gimmicks to worry about and no fancy-schmancy wandsawonder or stuff. So I cracked the PHB, the Ranger splatbook and got down to cases and by god it was hard work - wierd progressions in the tables, rules and exceptions and special cases all over the first 40 or 50 pages or so, non-weapon proficiencies, kits and so on and on and on...
Now obviously I have recent familiarity with D&D3 and little or none with AD&D2 so a lot of the handling time for this chargen will be down to that, but even so the AD&D2 mechanics are (IMO) just so full of kludges and bizarre cruft as to be unplayable for me (and don't get me started on how TSR could justify the padding and selling the same thing twice that was going on in that Ranger splatbook). Presumably if I went back to my old first edition books I'd encounter the same thing but those are sacrosanct to my teenage self and will remain lovingly (yet securely) locked away in a deep dark box in my deep dark attic.
So *my* nomination for least favourite pre-D&D3 book is the second edition PHB. I've played with it for precisely one session, it has no hallowed memories for me and, compared to my recent gaming with the D&D3.x rulesets, it sucked harder than the hardest vacuum.
Regarsd
Luke
Granted, then 3e D&D came along and enticed me back into the fold.
