I've heard a lot about d&d 3.5, 4 and 5, but what a bout 1 & 2? No-one ever seems to mention them...

I've heard a lot about d&d 3.5, 4 and 5, but what a bout 1 & 2? No-one ever seems to mention them. How do they stack up against the others?

Those who played 1 and 2 are probably too old for Veeky Forums.

They're combat systems and not really much good for anything else. It's debateable how good later versions are for anything except combat, but they at least give it a C- effort.

How exactly do you mean? I assume they still have non-combat abilities to some extent (perception, deception and all that)?

AD&D has fairly extensive rules for "exploration," or really more like rules for managing and presenting environments that presume they will be explored at some point, that are at least on par with the "C-" you give later versions. In fact they are probably more extensive than the rules for combat, at least in AD&D 1E. They've got all sorts of information about wilderness and dungeons and how to survive in them, and very little about how you're supposed to swing a sword. The idea that it's just a combat system and nothing else is revisionist schlock meant to justify people's shitty present day opinions.

There's a lot of AD&D and OSR threads so you probably just ended up missing them.

It's really a matter of taste.

Except if you prefer core only 3.PF, in which case you should just eat shit and die.

>>>/osrg/

>How exactly do you mean? I assume they still have non-combat abilities to some extent (perception, deception and all that)?

They do not. Any kind of skill check was simply a Ability Score test improvised by the DM.

What a shitty troll. 0/10

That's not true. I'm 19, but I started playing D&D with 1e AD&D because the DM got the books from his dad. Besides, there are some surprisingly old people on Veeky Forums.
THAC0's not that complicated, either, in fact in retrospect it was pretty neat how different weapons responded differently to different ACs: if I'm remembering it correctly, hammers and the like were more likely to deal damage against lower ACs, representing stuff like plate and things, compared to weapons that would be harder to damage with that stuff. On the other hand, this meant you had to consult a lot of little charts and transcribe them whenever you got a new weapon. Ups and downs.

1e was a mess, 2e was also a mess but at the same time the edition with all of the good settings. The best edition will always be Rules Cyclopedia.

I started playing D&D in 1995.

Lore was better by far, multiclassing, especially dipping, was MUCH less common, 2e had kits similar to 5e's archetypes but sometimes bigger overhauls.

Pretty much this. I started with AD&D. fun stuff, but it wasn't so much a coherent game as it was an accretion of dozens of different little systems and charts of varying quality. There was a lot of individual stuff and ideas that were very good, but if you tried to use everything the system could often get bogged down under the weight of it's own subsystems, and there was a lot of weird folding when certain systems interacted.

I realize it's shocking now, but a big thing that drive 3e development way back in the day was the realization that what AD&D started as and what they ended with were two entirely different things, and someone had to comb through it and try to come up with a consistent system instead of the mess of half-implemented mechanics and subsystems it had turned into by the '90s. There were something like three or four different attempts at feats and skill systems each, just in the stuff I can see on my bookshelf.

Of course, when they cleaned up and streamlined the systems (or at least attempted to), how broken some of the mechanics really were came to light. In AD&D all the old save or die/suck spells didn't usually break the game, because none of them ever worked on anything you really wanted to get disintegrated/finger of deathed, and the summon monster mechanics changes meant you went from a horde of fight-bogging crit-fishing chaff to a single monster that, while much easier to handle in rounds, to something that could legitimately unbalance the game if you spammed a few casts of it.

I played Icewind dale and Baldurs Gate, which heavily emphasize roleplaying, though of course with limitations, and maybe pretty bad in IWD when i think about it, but I liked the videogame versions.. As for the tabletop, it's like gygax is raping you with his infinite army of polearms and stupid dungeon elevation tricks and door opening, it's like a bad wargame, and he was an arrogant bastard as well, planting his flag on the shoulder of giants

>0e (Little Brown Books)
Much simpler than other D&D editions for good and for ill. The Greyhawk splat makes it a shoddy proto-AD&D

>AD&D 1e
A more complex game than 1e in both positive and negative senses. Formatting is still spotty.

>AD&D 2e
Slightly tighter version of 2e. Much more standardized style. Shitton of content, possibly the most of any D&D edition. Huge number of settings. Content is all over the place, with virtually useless options alongside gamebreakers in the same splat. Most of the problematic stuff comes from the twilight years of 2e.

>B/X, BECMI, RC
Refined versions of 0e that borrow a little from AD&D. Have their own little idiosyncrasies (cleric spell progressions).

>0e
That is such a shit way of putting it. Doubly redundant since A(dvanced) and basic are already differently designated as such.

Personally advanced dnd second edition is my favourite its pretty brutal sometimes but it isn't to complicated,

All forms of pre-3.0 D&D are terrible.

> over complicated rules
> far too many tables
> no unified mechanics
> alignment was still a fucking thing
> separate XP tables for everyone
> THAC0 is like using a hammer backwards; it still works fine but it's more complex than it needs to be


AD&D is good because of fast chargen and lack of high-damage bullshit that came with later editions. The stat block is also very minimalistic.

Except it's also bad. And literally all of the reboots are made by fuck-tards who keep sucking off the same stupid game they played 20 years ago.

AD&D was really only popular because it was the only RPG most people knew of, and the alternatives were pure garbage like RIFTS.

A refined version of AD&D could be excellent. Which was what 5e was supposed to be; except it wasn't, it was a mix of 4e and 2e (don't even pretend 3.5 was in there) which just made for an all-around crappy game.

TLDR D&D just sucks in general, play something better like Mouse Guard or Dungeon World.

>3.pf is the bestestest! Git R Done!
ftfy n trimmed out the extra fat

No, I said pre-3.0 D&D is terrible. Post-3.0 D&D is terrible as well but saying the former does not preclude the latter. You need to learn logic, son.

Also seeing as pre-3.0 D&D is literally the focus of this thread, I contained my criticism to that. Seeing as 3.5 and 4e and 5e criticism has already been done to death.

>when backpeddling goes wrong: the post

probably nostalgia speaking but I have fond memories playing the 2e setting Birthright.

> i limit myslf to the parameters of the thread
> I get shit on by OP who does not understand how set theory works

Also did you miss when I said this in my first post?

> TLDR D&D just sucks in general,

So...am I still backpedaling? Or are you just drawing conclusions you shouldn't be drawing?

He's clearly not saying that, dude.

You're a fucking retard.

This. I miss the fluff about biology and habits from the old MMs. Shit like that made it very, very easy to make a living, breathing world because you could easily populate your ecology and it worked. Now, you basically have to write your own, which is good sometimes, but sometimes you just want to fill in gaps.