AD&D Second Edition

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EOTB said:
Voros, I didn’t write the position you argued against
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The claim was that 1e has more players than 2e: 'So it has the fewest *devotees*, but the most non-AD&D players who give it thumbs-up while still preferring to play something else.'

Do we have anything to back that claim up besides forum talk?
 
Do you have anything to back up that it does?

Seems like you should be picking a bone with the OP.

Edit - also, the claim is that it has the fewest devotees of D&D editions - not a comparison to 1E only. But that people who don't play either AD&D as their primary RPG do like to give it kudos. Thus, the point-back to the OP.
 
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Stevethulhu said:
THAC0 is one o those things that The Internet has made into a much bigger deal than it really was. Its regularly used as a rod to beat AD&D 2 with, even though it's also in BECMI.
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It was a good tool to simplify the existing system before they decided to actually simplify the system with roll-high.

JG
 
Baulderstone said:
I wouldn't go that far. The debate about whether to adopt ascending AC can get heavy in the OSR at times. There is a reason that while B/X Essentials doesn't have it at all, Old School Essentials added ascending AC as an option.
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Such a simple statement about factual mechanics counts as "going far":shock:?
 
The weapon verses armour table should always have been the to hit table. That way there'd be no functional way to remove it.
 
Voros said:
I don't buy that 2e is the red-haired stepchild of D&D, I think that idea is all based on perspective and the distortions of the net. Forums, social media and blogs are no way to track popularity in rpgs, by that measure one could assume that the OSR is huge when actual sales reveal it to be a tiny fraction compared to 5e and other games.

Any actual facts to back up the claim that 'no one' plays 2e are hard to come by, Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds lump 1e and 2e games into AD&D and of course table play could be very different.

I know my entire group of buddies who played 2e D&D just stopped playing rpgs as we went to school, got careers and started families. They did not embrace 3e. Those same players skipped 3e and 4e entirely, many have started to return to rpgs as their lives have settled and 5e and the OSR have attracted them back to the game. People forget that most 2e players were introduced to the game by B/X or BECMI, so when they've returned to D&D they've often gone back to OSR games based on those editions rather than 2e because as adults with less time for gaming they can better appreciate their simplicity and speed of play.
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2e *is* my edition of choice. I confess I have *ZERO* information on how much it's played. I rarely, if ever, see people actively talking about it specifically on forums, or talk about playing it actively. Sure there's always the occasional thread, and the rare guy I see advertising LFG for his 2e campaign. But they're pretty rare. So it could be a perception thing.

And the entirety of the gaming public has shifted *massively* since 3x. dropped. So to me - it would not surprise me at all that 2e is "least played" - I lump 1e/2e together in the assumption that "least played" means a gaming population of near insignificance compared to the rest of the D&D-playing community.

I could be *totally* wrong.
 
tenbones said:
2e *is* my edition of choice. I confess I have *ZERO* information on how much it's played. I rarely, if ever, see people actively talking about it specifically on forums, or talk about playing it actively. Sure there's always the occasional thread, and the rare guy I see advertising LFG for his 2e campaign. But they're pretty rare. So it could be a perception thing.

And the entirety of the gaming public has shifted *massively* since 3x. dropped. So to me - it would not surprise me at all that 2e is "least played" - I lump 1e/2e together in the assumption that "least played" means a gaming population of near insignificance compared to the rest of the D&D-playing community.

I could be *totally* wrong.
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I think it comes down to where you look. I found a facebook group for Shadowrun 2 and 3e. Its quite active and talk about later editions is discouraged out of context.

I did see one for AD&D too but left after a short while due to a flame war... Or 10.

Rpg forums, I feel, tend to go more toward theory crafting and newer IP in general. The larger base means less experience with older systems on average.
The pub is an anomaly of that though.
 
I switched over to 2e in 1989 and didn't look back. I didn't get rid of my 1e materials, but I minimized mixing rules in because 2e already had the rules I wanted. Adventures and stuff was a different matter.

The 90s were mostly a Palladium era for me. Most of my pickup group stuff was Palladium oriented. I can definitely say that there was no common understanding of the Palladium system in those days. Everyone had a wildly different interpretation of how basic things worked. But with regards to AD&D2e? Everyone I encountered and played with was on the same page. They may have some oddball kits or something, but that was the extent of it. On the occasions where we did AD&D2e with people outside our circle, everyone was playing the same game.

I didn't adopt 3e. I had the books, and I ran and played a couple of times, but it never clicked with me. That said, I didn't play a lot of AD&D2e in the 00s either.

The long term games of 2e I would play would typically sputter out around 8th level.
 
Monstrous Compendium was awesome, except for that one horrible artist that drew every monster with the same set of weird, teeth.
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3FBAF4C3-3E15-4925-A2E8-DEF27BAE2C44.png
872AEEEA-D815-4B6C-B4EA-ED274606E71F.png
I mean what the fuck is the last one supposed to be? It sure isn’t a salamander.
 
Based on the little hard data I see, from online stats of Fantasy Grounds and Roll20, 1e and 2e together are less popular than 4e, which is far less popular than 3e, which is far less popular than 5e. This is not a great source, as older games might have more long running face to face games. But it appears that, overall, 5e is played roughly a hundred times more than AD&D. 1e and 2e are both really unpopular, as are most rpgs.
 
Yeah, I expect that AD&D is going to have tough sledding on VTTs since its only recently that they became "supported" rulesets. And I don't think they're going to vault into top-tier now that they are. But I'll be curiously watching whether or not there's a material increase in the # of games played now that (at least on FG) the DM doesn't have a much greater burden in running the game than those DMs running 5E, Pathfinder, etc.
 
CRKrueger said:
Monstrous Compendium was awesome, except for that one horrible artist that drew every monster with the same set of weird, teeth.
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I mean what the fuck is the last one supposed to be? It sure isn’t a salamander.
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lol, I kinda like that.

But now I'm curious about the loose-leaf monster manual. I only ever had the single volume HC "Monstrous Manual". I'm looking for something to do a new round of Doodling D&D, maybe I can track down a copy (even online) of these because it looks like it has a bunch of monsters I haven't done. Definitely don't recall seeing a slug-guy anywhere.
 
I dunno. I've played on Roll20 a fair amount and never bothered with any of the special assets such as character sheets with code. We just used it as a shared visual space where we could move around tokens and have a chat log and dice roller. In that respect, it supports all games equally. I have no idea how many people use the bells and whistles part.
 
As for the question of 2E's continued popularity, or lack thereof, I will say the times that I've put any 2E books up for sale in the last 3 years on social media, they've been snatched up in under an hour. I think online forums are really bad reflections of what's actually getting played - frex almost no ever discusses Palladium games on any forum I've ever frequented, but the player base for those games is HUUUGE
 
I have to agree. Popularity of older games will always look inferior to newer ones online.
Online is a culture. It isn't all encompassing. I would guess that half the people I know have little to no online footprint whatsoever and only a fraction of those that do could care at all about online forums and popularity polls.
Pretty much the ones that care about that sort of thing will be skewed towards newer games and younger crowds.
Imo
 
The primary perception point I consider is support material sales. 2E seems to have the least # of people making material specifically for it. Granted, it's easy to use 1E OSR stuff for 2E. But the relative few 2E clone adventures that go out there seem to have tough sledding in the OSR marketplace.

Which, if there is a large active playbase (as opposed to "like the game but don't play it much"), seems counter-intuitive to me.
 
My 2e shelf has everything I need and then some since 1998.
I still have modules I never ran and dont much care for newer stuff.
I also have core rules which is great tool.

... And I do have an online footprint and go to forums.

I get its a not a true scottsman argument, but in this case I think it adds insight to why it would be skewed.
 
Faylar said:
My 2e shelf has everything I need and then some since 1998.
I still have modules I never ran and dont much care for newer stuff.
I also have core rules which is great tool.

... And I do have an online footprint and go to forums.

I get its a not a true scottsman argument, but in this case I think it adds insight to why it would be skewed.
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I don't talk much about AD&D2e because honestly, I don't have any problems with it. And I long ago learned that no one wants to hear about my cool campaign or characters.

Since I was always laser focused on core, I don't need much of anything extra for it. I learned with Skills & Powers that adding stuff to it kind of farks it all up.

Maybe module wise, a lot of 2e players are like me. We liked story based adventures, but preferred our own plots to the railroads offered in the official products. Settings were also a huge thing during those years, and that's something that it doesn't seem the OSR really quite does the same way. There's certainly nothing with the same oomph to my POV as Dragonlance or Spelljammer or Ravenloft.
 
Only 2E module I ever ran was Planescape's The Great Modron March, but I customized it substantially. It's an incredible adventure - one of my favourite campaigns ever, but it opens with the most bullsh#t railroad to get players on board that I've ever seen
 
as Luke Skywalker once said “no game’s ever really gone” or something like that.

If you are your group are playing AD&D and enjoying yourselves, does it really matter if anyone else is?
 
Well I think for us 2e lovers, the question is (at least for me) what would a 2e retroclone look like that can capture the conceits of 2e?

For ME - it would be be completely modular with plug-and-play subsystems so even people that want their sacred-cow herd can have them. But for those of us that really went off-roading with all the shit-ton of house rules, can have those options too. So for magic - I'd have Magic Module systems for Vancian, Spell-point, Skill roll, and maybe take a stab at effect-based.

Combat - lord the, combat option potential! I'd leverage OA Martial Arts system and completely blow it out to go beyond "just Asian" Wuxia. This would keep with the Fighters fighting best, but giving them all kinds of options to do their thing in cool ways. For people that want to make it less "Asian" - not a problem, you simply model real-world fighting styles into codified manuevers that exemplify those styles. Keeps combat kinetic and flavorful - and better yet - even NON-fighter types can get some use out of them.

Don't get me started on this path... I can dance all day!
 
tenbones said:
Well I think for us 2e lovers, the question is (at least for me) what would a 2e retroclone look like that can capture the conceits of 2e?

For ME - it would be be completely modular with plug-and-play subsystems so even people that want their sacred-cow herd can have them. But for those of us that really went off-roading with all the shit-ton of house rules, can have those options too. So for magic - I'd have Magic Module systems for Vancian, Spell-point, Skill roll, and maybe take a stab at effect-based.

Combat - lord the, combat option potential! I'd leverage OA Martial Arts system and completely blow it out to go beyond "just Asian" Wuxia. This would keep with the Fighters fighting best, but giving them all kinds of options to do their thing in cool ways. For people that want to make it less "Asian" - not a problem, you simply model real-world fighting styles into codified manuevers that exemplify those styles. Keeps combat kinetic and flavorful - and better yet - even NON-fighter types can get some use out of them.

Don't get me started on this path... I can dance all day!
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I'm on board this train!
 
tenbones said:
Combat - lord the, combat option potential! I'd leverage OA Martial Arts system and completely blow it out to go beyond "just Asian" Wuxia. This would keep with the Fighters fighting best, but giving them all kinds of options to do their thing in cool ways. For people that want to make it less "Asian" - not a problem, you simply model real-world fighting styles into codified manuevers that exemplify those styles. Keeps combat kinetic and flavorful - and better yet - even NON-fighter types can get some use out of them.
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Oh yea, one of the handbooks (Ninja?) had a system for making up martials arts schools with available moves plus how much it affected offense and defense. I'd love to see something like that expanded.
 
I get some people endlessly defend THAC0 and descending AC, but to me, it would be the first thing to go in a retroclone of 2e. BAB and ascending AC was probably the best choice 3e actually made in its design. It made a lot of mistakes in other areas, and in the long run, I like 2e even as is more than 3.x, but it definitely has its rough spots.

2e was the system I learned when I started playing (I've been playing about as long as someone who is only 35 could be, AD&D 2e was new when I started playing at 6 years old), and I have nostalgia for it. It would probably be my second favorite form of D&D (behind 5e). Granted, D&D is no longer anywhere near my favorite system, but I'd play a 2e game if someone wanted to run it, and that isn't true for a lot of games.
 
I think the biggest thing for a 2e clone is to leave this current thought process of "simpler is better and players are too dumb for complex rules" behind.
AD@D os crunchy and convoluted with little to no harmony between modules (looking at you psionics). Its not clean and sanitized for all audiences.
 
Faylar said:
I think the biggest thing for a 2e clone is to leave this current thought process of "simpler is better and players are too dumb for complex rules" behind.
AD@D os crunchy and convoluted with little to no harmony between modules (looking at you psionics). Its not clean and sanitized for all audiences.
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I think there's a lot of advantages to that modular form of design. It allows the system to be robust whether one is playing just the basic rules or adding on any number of expanded specific rules.
 
TristramEvans said:
Honestly, it's not the rules for me so much as I don't think it could compete with the art.
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To me... it's the challenge of our generation. WHERE are the new Easley's? Where are the new Caldwell's and Elmore's? They're out there...

Of course we could tempt Easley/Caldwell/Elmore with KS stretchgoal moneys!!!
 
I'd say start with the base core rules and leave out the optional rules from the core books. Then add a supplement that includes the optional rules from the core books. Then you expand to all the splat books if you have the energy to tackle those rules.
 
I can see that as a desire, but I'm approaching it more from a project management standpoint where the project is broken down into more manageable sections. It would be a nightmare to try and reproduce the entire breadth of 2E in one go.
 
Spellslinging Sellsword said:
I can see that as a desire, but I'm approaching it more from a project management standpoint where the project is broken down into more manageable sections. It would be a nightmare to try and reproduce the entire breadth of 2E in one go.
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Well, presumably one needn't prepare it as a book until the project is finalized online. The difficulty of it as an overall project though would really depend on how much one intended to alter it.
 
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