AD&D Second Edition

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If the Rules Cyclopedia didn’t exist, AD&D2e would be my favorite. I’m not a big fan of three book games though. It should all be in one easy-to-use volume.
 
TristramEvans said:
I say the opposite - no splat books, just one giant Rules Cyclopedia for 2E - all the kits, all the options! A massive tome unlike anything the OSR has ever seen!
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I momentarily objected to this idea on the grounds that a massive book like that would only appeal to hardcore 2E fans, but then again, who the heck else would you be making this for?
 
Endless Flight said:
If the Rules Cyclopedia didn’t exist, AD&D2e would be my favorite. I’m not a big fan of three book games though. It should all be in one easy-to-use volume.
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The DMG is extraneous no matter what the edition. Cut the fluff and wankery and just integrate the needed material into the PHB.

I think for D&D's case a Monster book would still be a thing. Just put some common monsters in the back of the PHB, with about the same depth to the list that the B/X Basic book had.
 
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Just add the magic items to the back of the monster book.
 
I picture an appendix with spells, appendix with magic items, etc
 
Gabriel said:
The DMG is extraneous no matter what the edition. Cut the fluff and wankery and just integrate the needed material into the PHB.
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Yes, the format of the PH, DMG and MM comes from AD&D, and AD&D is nobody's idea of a well-organized rule set.
 
I ran 2E for years in high school and never bought the DMG.

I just gave out magic items from Dragon Magazines.
 
Damn, so this has got me thinking now...

Here's some brainstorms off the top of my head...

Keep it setting agnostic, except for the conciet of the multiverse/planes existing, and replace Alignment as a morality-based system with an Alignment to one of the Planes (none sopecifically "good" or "evil" per se, just different views on life. So an alignment of Shadow, Light, Xaos, Wyld, Mechanus, etc...

Reduce it to 5 classes (Warrior, Wizard, Rogue, Cleric, Psionicist) that only determine Advancement procedures, and then open everything else up to "Kits". But have Kits be completely open - meaning a person of any class can follow any Kit, the Class would just determine how quickly they advanced - their "natural aptitude".

OTOH have there also be specific "Racial Kits" that are only available to members of that Race

Re-instate the "Endgame" implied by the original game for higher level play
 
Well, let me note. I'm on an AD&D2E FB group. And it has 16000 members. It's not overtly active though: https://www.facebook.com/groups/77802512083/

There are 2 More with 2+K and 5+K fans respectively. Now actively? I've no idea how many of those play, we don't talk a lot about it admittedly. I suspect because we're actually playing games more than talking about them or are busy with family stuff. I just have a lot more free time than most people. On the other hand, many of those people may love/adore 2E and also play other editions, like me. Though my preference leans 2E hard after playing 5E since it came out and running this current game to the 8th level, I strongly want to go back to it. (I am enjoying an online 5E via FB chat with friends, quite well. Though, its quite a fun iteration but not IDEAL.)

When I worked in a bookstore 2E sold incredibly well. I also owned most of the products for gaming they put out (minus settings and things like Ninja/Necromancer and any historical era sourcebooks I didn't care for.) I even had the spell cards full boxed sets of spells, and the Encylopedia Magica. I don't talk about it a lot because frankly, so many people show up to shout down the idea that 2E was ever popular that it gets tiring to point out that YES is had a lot of fans. No, they're not always going to talk about it. (Before anyone pipes in about why TSR failed, it was complex, and involved the NOVEL departments, not treating Mass Markets paperbacks like mass markets already did--meaning when TSR finally agreed to accept returns of novels from bookstores, it literally cost them a fortune. The novels didn't sell well at all. Beyond Dragonlance and Drizzt.)

A lot of 2E fans are older (like me), but a lot of them still have their books and are still playing. I can RUN 2E with JUST the PHB for example (I have it and the MM, not the DMG, but that was its weakest book, though the class build mechanics were still awesome if imbalanced as heck.) But I mostly homebrew--settings, magic items, even new spells. I have since I started playing, that or giving stories to magic items. Long before 5E came a long, long before 3E came along, I was running 2E which required you do things like learn a magic swords name, or do something special with it to find out what it could do. Identify and Detect magic could tell you a lot--but not how to turn it on. Making magic items in my game was also never a matter of spells, but situations---and the legends behind them. I see that Heroic Journeys 2E, is an OSR with rules for that (mine own High Valor talks about it, but there are no points to spend its a matter of action in-game, not mechanics.)

Many of my players started with 2E, and enjoyed it. Though they were younger and moved to 3E--I tried it and found it wasn't what I wanted for D&D.

Though, I'm very much into the idea of AD&D as a toolbox, rather than 5E's "let's sell you a bunch of slightly variant setting of generic fantasy and make FR core! I like giving ways to build toward the campaign you want to run. Want Asian wuxia inspired stories? Here are kits, and tools to do that. Want tools for Dark Ages fantasy in the style of Charlemagne? Here are the rules for that? Want a mish-mash? Use A, B, and Z.
 
I had so much fun with 2e. And I prefer Thac0 and descending AC, FWIW. There certainly is a thread running from 2e to 5e: 5e is pretty close to what I would have wanted 3e to be. I still peruse my 2e books from time to time.

IMO, the 2e Monstrous Manual is one of the greatest bestiaries of all time, along with the UK D&D Creature Catalog and the Chivalry & Sorcery 3e Bestiary. :smile:
 
TristramEvans said:
Damn, so this has got me thinking now...

Here's some brainstorms off the top of my head...

Keep it setting agnostic, except for the conciet of the multiverse/planes existing, and replace Alignment as a morality-based system with an Alignment to one of the Planes (none sopecifically "good" or "evil" per se, just different views on life. So an alignment of Shadow, Light, Xaos, Wyld, Mechanus, etc...

Reduce it to 5 classes (Warrior, Wizard, Rogue, Cleric, Psionicist) that only determine Advancement procedures, and then open everything else up to "Kits". But have Kits be completely open - meaning a person of any class can follow any Kit, the Class would just determine how quickly they advanced - their "natural aptitude".

OTOH have there also be specific "Racial Kits" that are only available to members of that Race

Re-instate the "Endgame" implied by the original game for higher level play
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These aren't bad ideas--although I like the ideas of keeping the megaclasses/subclass split with Kits above/below that somewhere? Because in 5E, for example, Samurai/Noble are different takes on the same class (backgrounds) but some people want more implicit class build structures for them as well (hence why there is both a background Samurai and Class Samurai as options.)

Myself? I see "Fighter" as the main class, and giving options to split that and tools to build subclasses from "Fighter" the archetype into Ranger, Paladin, etc. With kits for cultural/racial background elements (Like an all Barbarian campaign where the savage Barbarians are heroes against the civilized and corrupt peoples around them or vice versa--but you can have a Barbarian Warrior, Barbarian Ranger (Hunter), Barbarian Wizard (Shaman or if you want that under cleric we can use another term.)

Druid as a class is kinda odd (so is Ranger) because of the many influences sucked into them to make a class--so why not make "Druid" a Kit? A Druid Bard (Who keeps the lore), A Druid Priest (who maintains the health/fertility of animals/farmlands/etc), and a Druid Fighter (Ranger?) who defends the wilderness?

I mean I can see a lot of ways to do this.
 
Silverlion said:
These aren't bad ideas--although I like the ideas of keeping the megaclasses/subclass split with Kits above/below that somewhere? Because in 5E, for example, Samurai/Noble are different takes on the same class (backgrounds) but some people want more implicit class build structures for them as well (hence why there is both a background Samurai and Class Samurai as options.)

Myself? I see "Fighter" as the main class, and giving options to split that and tools to build subclasses from "Fighter" the archetype into Ranger, Paladin, etc. With kits for cultural/racial background elements (Like an all Barbarian campaign where the savage Barbarians are heroes against the civilized and corrupt peoples around them or vice versa--but you can have a Barbarian Warrior, Barbarian Ranger (Hunter), Barbarian Wizard (Shaman or if you want that under cleric we can use another term.)

Druid as a class is kinda odd (so is Ranger) because of the many influences sucked into them to make a class--so why not make "Druid" a Kit? A Druid Bard (Who keeps the lore), A Druid Priest (who maintains the health/fertility of animals/farmlands/etc), and a Druid Fighter (Ranger?) who defends the wilderness?

I mean I can see a lot of ways to do this.
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The other way I was thinking is sorta inspired by Overlord - Just a ton of classes, with Most having 10 Levels, Kits OTOH being very specific and having 5 Levels. Every character has a Max of 100 Levels before the Endgame kicks in , and can take any combination within those 100 levels (with the exception that certain Classes require levels in other classes to match).
 
Eh, but on second thought, too many changes leads down a rabbithole. The closer to the original presentation, probably the better (although I think Alignment could be swapped out without monkeying with it too much)
 
TristramEvans said:
The other way I was thinking is sorta inspired by Overlord - Just a ton of classes, with Most having 10 Levels, Kits OTOH being very specific and having 5 Levels. Every character has a Max of 100 Levels before the Endgame kicks in , and can take any combination within those 100 levels (with the exception that certain Classes require levels in other classes to match).
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That way lies the madness of one of my early attempts at a game called Paths of Glory, where you just take and stack classes up to build what D&D would call a specific class--I mentioned it offhand above. but it was a tree of branching paths you could take that became extremely complex (in many ways I'd like to blame Warhammer FRPG for this) but the idea was Fighter+Cleric (with 2:1 levels) became a Paladin, and Ranger was Fighter+Rogue (with swapped out Wilderness skills)+Druid (Cleric) at 2:1:1 ratios) Once you completed the ratio from then on you were the new class and everything stacked FOR that classes purposes. But having watched 5E multiclass builds, I'm terrified of the implications of going that way.

Oh and OHT! Birthright is a HUGE reason why I want to rebrew AD&D2E, but improve it and clean it, and make it a toolset. (Heck even the "fewer" monsters, works great with that kind of setting.) It and Charlemagne's Paladins are the reasons when I REALLY went write my first to be published RPG (High Valor) I first did a bunch of research on Beowulf, King Arthur/Arthurian legends, Celtic legends, European Folklore, read the Silmarillion twice (again) and so on.

Its early iterations look like a simplified version of CoC though. (Skill 1 vs Skill 1 gave you X percent chance to hit/dodge/whatever) similar to the resistances table (IIRC) though eventually, I ditched it for a more elegant, cleaner design. I swear someday I will run Birthright WITH High Valor.

It didn't come out first for a lot of reasons. I learned a LOT designing Hearts & Souls. Hence why its 2E is going to be incredible, I hope.

As a complete aside I've written numerous RPGs and bits of RPG's since I was 12, none of those things were worth publishing. (Sadly, if I'd managed the VERY first one I'd tried, I'd have beat both Nightlife and WOD to the urban fantasy realm)
 
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I suspect 2e sold very well, at least the first five years. The 90s were a weird time for RPGs. I actually actively stopped buying them right around 1993 or so. I remember going into stores then and basically wasn’t impressed with what was out there and kind of fell away from the hobby for about quite a few years. I got back into it around 2002, when I got into Mutants & Masterminds, Lord of the Rings and d20 Modern. You could say that the OGL was a big reason my passion was reignited.
 
TJS said:
I ran 2E for years in high school and never bought the DMG.

I just gave out magic items from Dragon Magazines.
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One of my players was running it for a few months when he called me up and asked me a pretty basic rules question. I pointed out where it was at (two decades ago, I no longer remember the rule or the book) and asked him why he was asking me.

He admitted that he had never read the rulebooks and was just running for another friend how I ran it for him.

His parents could have saved themselves some cash on at LEAST the DMG.
 
Tommy Brownell said:
Wonder if that would have improved the organization?
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Possibly to some extent. I realize that when I edit an RPG, I have the advantage of easily being able to make edits to a word file after a round of playtesting.

I think the bigger issue is that he was trying to make what he thought people wanted based on all the letters pouring into TSR.
 
I know some argue that there is a need for the separation of player and DM material so that the players don't have access to the monster and magic item information, but I've found that when I GM a game half the players never read the rules anyways. :shade:
 
Spellslinging Sellsword said:
I know some argue that there is a need for the separation of player and DM material so that the players don't have access to the monster and magic item information, but I've found that when I GM a game half the players never read the rules anyways. :shade:
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In this digital age, it's easy enough to download it.
I always hated the DM trying to gate me off from the rest of the game like that anyway. If you don't trust your players enough not to act on the information, maybe you need new players.
 
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Baulderstone said:
Yes, the format of the PH, DMG and MM comes from AD&D, and AD&D is nobody's idea of a well-organized rule set.
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Hmm. OD&D: Men & Magic = PHB, Monsters & Treasure = Monster Manual (OK, plus magic items); The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures = DMG.

Not that that's anybody's idea of a well-organized rule set, either, but not because of how the books were divided up.

(But the division is not that bad, if you have only one copy; players want to look at the PHB during play, and DMs want to look at the DMG and MM during play, so combining the latter two might make more sense but would be unwieldy.)
 
Stan said:
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.
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Yep, that is The Complete Ninja's Handbook by the talented Aaron Allston, I think it is a good replacement system for the martial arts in OE.
 
Spellslinging Sellsword said:
I know some argue that there is a need for the separation of player and DM material so that the players don't have access to the monster and magic item information, but I've found that when I GM a game half the players never read the rules anyways. :shade:
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When I was a teenager, everyone got their hands on a copy of the rules (whether or not they read them, though...). As an adult, no one I game with regularly bothers with it.
 
3 books, 512 pages - Oh the humanity, it’s too disorganized!
1 book, 512 pages - Oh the humanity, it’s too big a book!
1 book, 128 pages - Oh the humanity, it’s rulings not rules!
Rules without examples - Too dry and technical!
Rules with examples and rationale - God, all this cruft!

Human brains are built to organize and classify things, the problem is, you ask 10 people how to do it, you get 18 answers.
 
My sweet spot is a booklet with 64 pages. Anything more than that and doubts start to creep in. Like when I'd gotten everyone up and running on basic D&D and someone turned up with AD&D. And the Dungeon Masters guide... :shock: Lugging that damn thing to school every day probably accounts for my bad back in later life. Well, that and eating/drinking too much/not exercising enough.
 
Silverlion said:
So there isn't a lot of love for this one--despite some good ideas (YMMV, IMHO.) However, if you played 2E AD&D, what did you like? What would you take for an OSR game if anything?

AD&D2E is still my favorite for a lot of reasons (don't get me wrong 5e is fun) but the worlds and flexibility opened by kits and settings in 2E were amazing. Mind you, I believe kits should be a "this fits X setting," not a players option. Unless they're building the setting with you.

Me? I'd keep the core Mega classes: Cleric, Fighter, Magic-User, Rogue.
Then keep the "classes" as specific sub-classes of the frame.
Kits would remain but become specifically background/cultural and/or special training. Though balanced a bit better.

In many ways, 5E did some of these things: Subclasses and "Kits" but Kits as Backgrounds. Though left out grouping similar classes together (who often shared many details.) It also went back to basic for Proficiency bonus (everyone has the same to hit bonus based on level, which sort of underwhelms the straight-line fighter.)

I've been considering this at length because AD&D2E had a specific feel I liked, characters didn't feel too-powerful at the beginning but grew to stand out even more so against the default monsters/creatures. Especially in a few settings. Now with 5E (which I love) you feel effective but are still not going to rush a dragon at level 1-3 (well sort of I think the DMG puts a wee white dragon for characters in the DMG "adventure" but I may be misremembering another edition.)

Mind you, I'm a big fan of making a lot of things "options." Which is what 2E did.
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I loved the settings. I also don't have the negative reaction to a lot of the aesthetics that people seem to have. The biggest weakness I think is a lot of the stuff that should have been in the DMG was pushed into some of the blue books. I liked that a lot of the extra features were optional. I also think the kits were pretty solid and had more flavor than crunch (whereas 3E seemed to shift more toward crunch with its splat material).
 
I dont get why people insist on judging a system by its page count instead of its content.
Art, examples, story filler. All of that enhances the system and takes pages.
So long as its organized well and rules are accessible. You can skip the stuff that you personally feel is superfluous.

That being said though... 3/4 of the dmg was trash.
 
Tommy Brownell said:
When I was a teenager, everyone got their hands on a copy of the rules (whether or not they read them, though...). As an adult, no one I game with regularly bothers with it.
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I'd like to think that's maturity resulting in not wanting to be a rules lawyer or use OOC information.

Stan said:
For every edition, the dmg has been my least used core book. There's usually a few ideas but it's mostly for the occasional use of treasure tables and magic items.
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The third OD&D book was used to get the idea of how to create a dungeon/wilderness/game world and then only for the wandering monster tables, and even then most DMs I met made up their own tables. Running mostly the campaign books and modules in 5e, I have needed the DMG for little more than the magic items. It's also frustrating because it doesn't make explicit the expectations the rules were built on, like how many magic items characters should expect per level.
 
It’s the official D&D edition I played most. Had all sorts of books. Nothing but props here, though I’ve moved away from the official game line and into other versions.

On the subject of updating/revisiting, maybe a group product, kinda like Dragonsfoot did when they created, I think it was, a setting? Old School Essentials is cleaned up B/X. Why not 2E?
 
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cranebump said:
It’s the official D&D edition I played most. Had all sorts of books. Nothing but props here, though I’ve moved away from the official game line and into other versions.

On the subject of updating/revisiting, maybe a group product, kinda like Dragonsfoot did when they created, I think it was, a setting? Old School Essentials is cleaned up B/X. Why not 2E?
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I think it's because of the modular nature of 2e. What would a 'base' version of it look like when there were several options to choose from from the word go? I think it would be another version of 1e, and a supplement of 2e ideas for the rest of book.
 
Stan said:
For every edition, the dmg has been my least used core book. There's usually a few ideas but it's mostly for the occasional use of treasure tables and magic items.
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I’m impressed by the 5e DMG, if I was a new DM there is a lot of good advice, options and content in there.

The 2e DMG has the best cover of the bunch though, colourful and evocative.

69F15A85-CFFE-4D64-B78F-08CAC55C0A28.jpeg
 
Voros said:
The 2e DMG has the best cover of the bunch though, colourful and evocative.

View attachment 15194
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I actually find that art rather blandly generic and think this art is more evocative of a tome that is going to introduce you to the secret, arcane, intertwined arts of devil-worship and Dungeon Mastering:
IMG_0004-3.jpg​
 
Magister said:
It's also frustrating because it doesn't make explicit the expectations the rules were built on, like how many magic items characters should expect per level.
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According to Xanathar’s Guide the treasure tables are built to reflect that expectation in terms of the number of magic items the PCs receive. They say, ‘In short, the tables do the work.’ But they do give an optional table on pg. 135 of Xanathar for those who want it.
 
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Voros said:
According to Xanathar’s Guide the treasure tables are built to reflect that expectation in terms of the number of magic items the PCs receive. They say, ‘In shorts, the tables do the work.’ But they do give an optional table on pg. 135 of Xanathar for those who want it.
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I find the whole premise of "expecting X number of magic items per level" alien to any D&D I've ever played. I like it best when they are all rare and unique and you may have to learn their history to use them correctly instead of "hey, I should have a +3 sword by now."
 
Dumarest said:
I actually find that art rather blandly generic and think this art is more evocative of a tome that is going to introduce you to the secret, arcane, intertwined arts of devil-worship and Dungeon Mastering:
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I like that one too, I think it is a big improvement over the original cover which is primitive with none of the charm or intentional surrealism of Otus.
 
Dumarest said:
I find the whole premise of expecting X number of magic items per level" alien to any D&D I've ever played.
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They also give options for just eyeballing the items you have the PCs find as well, 5e is very much ‘this is an option but you can do it how you prefer.’ In that way it is very much like 2e, which emphasized options and making the game your own.
 
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