Yes! This! I felt all the Options books really should have been aimed at GM's, I know they wanted players to spend more money, but so much of the stuff needed GM approval (Also some of it was mutually exclusive!)
I didn't play D&D at all from 1983 to into the 90s, for various reasons. Those of my friends who did (and they stopped by the mid-80s) played B/X, and maintained that AD&D was a waste of time, adding much complexity for no return. There was one exception, but he played with a completely different group of people, and they did AD&D and nothing else. The main group of us at high school just didn't play any sort of D&D at all - I never really had, the other had moved on from B/X - we played Rolemaster (or a RM+MERP mix because we couldn't get hold of Spell Law for some time), Runequest, Chivalry & Sorcery, Aftermath!, Space Opera, and a number of other games that didn't really capture our imaginations. The closest to D&D would've been one guy's Palladium RPG game, but he mostly ran Aftermath!, so it wasn't a common game in our 'rotation'. Late high school and into varsity the games of choice became Twilight: 2000, Spacemaster, MegaTraveller, but still no D&D - I didn't get into that until the mid-90s when I joined a group playing AD&D2.
At least the 'options' books presented their content as being optional, and to be added or not to fit a DM's vision. The brown splatbooks, on the other hand, were not presented that way, and some of their stuff was really bad. I regret selling my core AD&D2 books (first printing), and I regret selling my 'options' books, but I do not miss the splatbooks at all.
Pretty much my experience as well when I started in March of 1978. Or close enough.
PHB p8 said:
The Complete Fighter back cover blurb said:
To add to this, was on my tablet and didn't feel like finger typing last night. I've always said that I was grateful to Gary and crew for kicking open the door that helped create this hobby, that said, DnD was problematic right from the get-go for me and quite a few others in the area I grew up gaming in.
Even the core books had a ton of optional stuff. Almost everything was optional in 2E, including things like NWPs. I almost never saw the players option books [edit: meant skills and powers] accepted at a table (I knew one person in all the groups I played in who was a big fan). I never allowed it, most GMs I knew did not allow it. In pretty much every 2E campaign I was in, anything from a supplement book had to be brought in with GM permission (which generally was a lot more scrutinizing than say in 3E). And if something seemed unbalanced, it was very quickly not allowed in my experience. There was min maxing to be sure, but nothing like you had in the 2000s under d20 (just wasn't even in the same ball park)
I saw BECMI or B/X as being pretty much interchangeable. I enjoyed both though my preference was always for B/X, mostly as it was cheaper and the presentation was tighter in play. The presentation of BECMI with its 5 box sets and tutorial style of Basic was attractive to a younger me as a collector and reader (just not so much as a player).
Other than the Palladium Fantasy bit, which I have never encountered in the wild.
I had that very thought (bolded above) a few times while reading your posts on the subject. Yeah for where I was at Palladium Fantasy had a DnD (classes/levels/similar stats) and yet a more active combat mechanics system that I craved. I felt it was a solid gateway rpg to convert DnD players over to systems that were more fun and enjoyable to me as a GM and player.Get out of my head!
My first brush with Palladium was Mechanoid invasion, which seemed very cool, but archaic with its "throwback" to D&D mechanics (with Palladium Fantasy adding context, Palladium's reliance on D&D style systems makes so much more sense to me these days).
RQ was a revelation to me, and luckily at the time most of the kids I played with were enamored with hit locations, so it was easy to find people to play with. The fact Excalibur came out soon after discovering RQ didn't hurt with its fairly brutal combat scenes adding to the whole mystique of hit locations. RQ's quasi Bronze Age / Greek Mythology feel certainly didn't hurt with kids who grew up on Ray Harryhausen's Jason & the Argonauts and Sinbad flicks.
A little more context. 2E came out as I was finishing grad school. At that point I had been running my 2nd Cold Iron for a year or two so D&D was just off my radar. In 1990 after finishing grad school, I moved to North Carolina for work and decided I was done with AD&D (thus the sale). For 2 or 3 years, I didn't have much luck finding players, but did some RQ, some of my own "generic" game system, and not much else. Then I started my 1990s RQ campaign. When that ended, I bumped around with not much play, doing some Everway, Deadlands, and 7th Sea. By 2001 I was deep in a march of death project at work which ended with a layoff in early 2002. I managed to find a new position in the company in Oregon and moved out here.
Yea, 3E was a lot of work. Arcana Unearthed/Evolved is an interesting take that would be a lot of effort to run with something else as it leans heavy into the 3.x class and level system with feats and prestige classes.
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I liked it personally as player. More classes for AD&D was a good thing. Were they balanced compared to the previous classes? Nope. Had a blast playing a barbarian. Plus more stuff for the races was a good thing as well. Over all I felt that Unearthed Arcana was a positive for AD&D 1st edition.
When it was released I wasn’t reading Dragon magazine yet so it was all new to me and was kind of mind blowing - a huge trove of new options and stuff (spells, gear, magic items)!
I never picked that one up. I was a kid. Games were expensive for me, and I didn't just play D&D. Also, I'd picked up the World of Greyhawk boxed set the year before and was still sour over its uselessness.
We used weapon specialization and not much else. I forget what all the sequence of the non-weapon proficiency system was, was there some in UA or was that the Wilderness and Dungeon Survival Guides?
Non-weapon proficiencies debuted in Oriental Adventures about 6 months after UA (and were then expanded in the Survival Guides the following year) though a lot of the barbarian class abilities track pretty closely with what would eventually be called NWPs (and I believe were reclassified as such in the OA version of the class).
No. I only used some of the magic items and weapon specialization (though I think BECM'Is Weapon Mastery is better and more interesting in some ways.)
Arcana Unearthed was not Unearthed Arcana for 1E (You may be aware, you may not, not sure.) It had some fun ideas and I liked it better than straight 3E in some ways,.
I was aware, but this thread veering in all directions I might've lost my awareness on what branch we were on.
Skills & Powers and Combat & Tactics were what I think of as late in AD&D2's run, but probably more mid-life if we count from publication of the core books through to 3e's publication. Most people didn't allow them. I did, but while I used much of C&T, S&P was used by me as GM to modify classes to fit a concept as arrived at by the player and me. So the fighter/magic-user that could cast in armour existed, but the player didn't get to 'balance' it by ditching all the spell schools they'd never use - I balanced it in other ways (it it worked out pretty well).
You couldn't mini-max the same way, because there just weren't as many moving parts making up a character. That also made it a heck of a lot easier for a GM to tell is something was broken. And besides, balance between characters, especially combat balance, just wasn't as important pre-3e. Of all the things that 3e introduced that looked like a good idea, but has become a millstone, that and 'encounter balance' have to be the biggies.
