What was wrong with 2E? I never see it talked about here on Veeky Forums, not even in the OSR thread...

Sure, I like AD&D 2e, but I don't really have anything to talk about the mechanics per se. I wouldn't actually allow any of the broken splat kits you'd see in say, Baldur's Gate 2, in a table top game. It isn't a game about building broken characters like 3e.

2e is in a weird middle ground between old school and new school. It's a fine system, and the warts it does have can easily be covered by a competent GM, but there's little to argue about concerning 2e any more.

You guys really aren't that experienced if you're unfamiliar with 2e build discussion and the "broken" combinations available.

It almost sounds like you guys think D&D tournaments started with 3rd edition.

If you wanted to talk about Planescape or Dark Sun lore, or something, that'd be a thread. But you can't really mess up character creation in 2e. It is actually a system designed to make randomly rolled characters playable (unlike later editions which are mostly definitely not).

Right? You must be so oldschool and we're just children, oh wise one.

Look, we all figured out what our campaigns were and weren't going to admit over a decade ago. Why rehash it? So you and I could agree on the exact same list? Snore.

I disagree. Sure, 2e dart fighters are often brought up, but they don't work out to be very overpowered in play without the use of bits from Skills and Powers, and S&P is itself a mess of broken shit that nobody uses, for good reasons.

There are broken kits, I even said so. But splats in 2e are explicitly optional and we never used them.

And no, I didn't go to AD&D tournaments in the 90s. Like most people on this board I'm way too young. I didn't even find a proper playgroup until 3e had just come out. We ran a sort of Frankenstein combination of the editions.

>It is actually a system designed to make randomly rolled characters playable

If that was the intention, it failed in the execution. Thankfully, it's a collaborative game and imbalances between the party members needn't ruin a night, but it's got such awful balance that it really can't be held up to modern standards where inter-party balance is considerably more stressed.

It's balance could be better, but it was excellent compared to 3e. There is no equivalent of the Tier 1 or 2 classes in 2e, for one thing.

I enjoyed it at the time, but it's pretty dated. There's not really much reason to be playing it or thinking about it at all any more.

My views of AD&D 2e in general are heavily warped by the fact that Dark Sun was the first box I got. It expressly tells you to roll FOUR characters so you have a quick backup when you die and uses a different stat system.

However, if I ever managed to run a 2e campaign again, I would run Dark Sun with the standard 1-18 system. It is iconic and the numbers "mean" something. I can't look at the 1-20 system and make sense of how the character is compared to the average.

One reason that it's talked about less in OSR is that it's less old school. It's more middle school. 2e greatly accelerated a shift away from the narrowly targeted dungeon crawl (or wilderness slog) that D&D is actually good at. D&D isn't a very versatile game, which isn't to say that you can't do a lot with it, just that it's clumsy at doing most things outside that range. It's also worth mentioning that in earlier D&D, you got most of your XP from gold, which does seem a bit contrived and gamy, but it rewarded you for being clever and avoiding fights whenever you could, rather than attacking everything you came across.

AD&D in general does have more options than Basic D&D, but a lot of the extra material is rubbish. It's a bunch of obnoxious restrictions, fiddly stats and unnecessary rules. Percentile strength (why add an additional subsystem just for the 1 out of 216 characters who rolled an 18 strength?). Demihuman level caps that vary according to their prime requisite (it's not enough that you have a sizable bonus from your high stat, now you need to be able to attain 28% higher levels as well?). Separate system shock and resurrection survival stats even though they're never more than 5% apart (and are always exactly 5% apart until you get into the 90%s and shit slows down so you don't slam into the ceiling). Two different damages for each weapon. Separate to-hit adjustments against each type of armor for each weapon in an absurdly long list (which, granted, almost always got ignored). Spells with more moving parts, scaling stats, and so forth, as if making shit more complicated (and thus slowing the game down) was good in and of itself.

And while 2e does tidy up 1e a bit, dropping some of the more obnoxious shit, it also adds non-weapon proficiencies into the core, and expands into kits and so forth in the supplements. More mechanics for character-building is fine, but it's clumsily done and doesn't work well with the base rules of the system.

As others have said, there isn't much to talk about. It is a really great system. Until 5e came out I was pretty much pure 2e, having given up on the 3whatever and 4nope editions.

The only thing to keep in mind is that the later options books, there were a couple of them (Skills and Powers, etc), must be considered even more optional than the other optional add ons. Lots of trouble from those books.

But 2e is great. There was just so much developed for it. Nothing has compared so far. Especially in regards to settings. Just so many settings got so much love and development.

Even if you don't play 2e you should consider the settings books and then just make changes as you want.

Oh, the new production of the 2e monster manual is great by the way.

>Oh, the new production of the 2e monster manual is great by the way.

Too true. I'm actually putting in a little work converting some of the monsters in it over to 5e, and it's just a great source of inspiration otherwise.

>Even if you don't play 2e you should consider the settings books and then just make changes as you want.

Some of them don't even have rules in them. They are just lore.

cont.
And even if 2e is tidier than 1e, it loses a lot of 1e's energy. And 2e failed to really advance the game in a time when the RPG market was evolving, which resulted in D&D lagging behind. As a result, in my experience, 2e tended to gather less-creative gamers who bragged about high their stats were and wanted to mindlessly hack-and-slash their way through shit instead of really investing in role-playing. Gorf was a great video game for its time, but if you released a game almost exactly like it 2 decades later, it really wouldn't be very impressive.

Basic has been the favorite of the OSR community because it's easier to work with. It gives you the essential foundations of the game on which you can build. AD&D is sort of like a particular brand of house rules built on top of this, and you probably want to make your own house rules. Sure, you can steal rules from AD&D, but it makes sense to build from the ground up rather than tearing pieces out of a complex system and then inserting new pieces.

Also, the core stuff tends to be better on average than material that AD&D added, much of which is derivative or comparatively unpolished. And the number of retroclones that are out for Basic might encourage you to play some version of Basic, even if you wouldn't gravitate towards Basic on your own.

I was looking over both the 5e and the 2e monster manuals just the other day. First time I had looked at the side by side and was comparing them.

I'm not sure which I prefer. On the one hand the 5e book is just much prettier - just sort of nicer to read. Larger font, maybe even a bit of excessive art, extra decoration. Really nice. almost like a coffee table book in comparison.

But, damn, the 2e MM sure delivered. Talk about an information dump. And everything just seems in many ways so well organized. Maybe a bit over organized in some ways, maybe a bit military manualish. But...damn...did it just have so much more stuff.

I'd like to see something a bit more middle ground. After looking over the 2e MM I would look at the 5e MM and 'wasted space' just kept jumping out at me. I kept thinking about how there could have been an extra paragraph or two of monster lore for X monster if only they had done it just a bit more like the 2e book.

But the 5e MM sure is pretty, gotta give it that.

What do you guys think?

Most folks have already covered all the bases here.

There's hardly anything worth using 2e for that the Rules Cyclopedia isn't better at, and that with only schlepping around a single rulebook.

And you have to use XP for gold or you're not really playing D&D at all to begin with.

2e took a lot of the options that had been released over the course of the 70's and 80's and made them standard, like nonweapon proficiencies. Bard became a base class that didn't require titanic ability scores and 10-16 levels in other classes to achieve. Everything was indexed a lot better, with simple things like weapon statistics, initiative, and how to resolve an attack roll confined to one section each instead of scattered all over the book (or, in the case of attack rolls, across TWO books.) THAC0 became an official term, as it was expected for players to help the DM figure out whether their attacks hit rather than just trusting the DM to find it in the right table. The things people never used, like alignment languages and potion miscibility, were usually thrown out, with one exception: 2e tried hard to bring back 3d6-in-order as the standard method of generating ability scores, even though people had been using 4d6-drop-lowest and other more forgiving methods as the de facto default for 20 years at the time.

>Gold was xp, thus enticing players to earn gold by any means OTHER than going into dungeons
>and yet the only thing it's good at is going into dungeons

Not a great plan. Gold as xp belongs in a game like Ryuutama where the focus isn't on a linear path of murder

>Gold was xp, thus enticing players to earn gold by any means OTHER than going into dungeons
If you even award XP for gold not earned through adventuring. Besides, most groups want to adventure and not play business executives, because it's a lot more fun.

Which is why you shouldn't punish players for going out to slay a mighty but penniless beast

Why isn't the lair filled with offerings of treasure and the armor and weapons of fallen heroes?

I don't know if it was explicit in AD&D, but it's generally understood that you only get XP for treasure obtained in the wilderness, or with some amount of risk. It's an abstract proxy for rewarding adventure.

>linear path of murder
That style of game doesn't work well when you start play with 4 hitpoints.

It was a fine system back in its day but it was really showing its age as we went into the 90s and White Wolf really took off. Theres a lot of things old AD&D didnt do very well at all and the game balance/crunch aspect was broke in a less linear and obvious way than 3rd would end up.

For instance the sheer difference between a Fighter with Weapon specialization in one of the 3 weapons that are mathematically superior to everything else and anything thats not him is nuts. If a guy gets RNG Lucky in character creation the game balance goes right out the window as a Fighter with high STR/DEX/CON gets such massive benefits that anything that challenges his insane Hit rate/Damage/Tankiness will murder everything else.A Multi-classed Demi-human Fighter/Casterwhateverfuckyou will have slightly less HP but fight almost on par with the regular fighterguy and get an entire spell list to abuse and since casting stats had very little overall effect you get by with a middling stat knowing you were never getting to lv15 in the first place.Compare that to the Thief a class that spends most of its career failing at its niche 40-50% of the time usually requires two rolls on things that are DEATH to fail has a THAC0 of "miss" and an AC of "Hit everytime" and has one offensive ability that can only be used out of combat

This is even before you look at the splatbooks that came later.

Not multiclassing thief with fighter seems to be designed to be foolish.

On the one hand I like multiclassing. It is much more elegant than the class buffet of 3e and gives you iconic combinations that really better fit fantasy archetypes than the single classes do. But on the other hand it gives too obvious of an advantage.

bump

>Why isn't the lair filled with offerings of treasure and the armor and weapons of fallen heroes?
What lair? Sticking absolutely everything in a dungeon full of treasure makes no sense in terms of ecology, economics, or just in terms of how hunting works. It's also boring as hell.

Consider that every monster in AD&D has a percent chance that it is in its lair at the time. So when it isn't there, that means PCs are either dealing with a monster outside its lair (which means there's a very good chance they won't be able to track it back to the inexplicable pile of treasure it sleeps on and thus gain no xp, even if they are rewarded by NPCs or butcher the monster for valuable parts,) or an unguarded lair (for which they might also gain no xp if looting the place was no challenge.) Neither outcome is fun.

>What was wrong with 2E?
THACO and... probably something else.

Descending AC, the way the range and scale of everything changed between indoors and outdoors, the completely nonsensical race/class/level restrictions, dual classing, the way it handled initiative and surprise, the 1e tables for how each weapon worked against each type of armor, am I forgetting anything?

Dual classing is truly awful. The only way it can be considered good is by loooking at the end result: which is the combination of two classes with no downside. But there is a downside; having to actually play a campaigned with your gimped ass dual classing character.

Its been on my mind that if I were to do 2e again, I'd allow humans to also multiclass if they wanted to.

AD&D is nearly the same as 2e.

You're stupid, is what the problem with THAC0 is.

Yeah, that's the piddling stuff I hardly noticed, aside from thinking a few class restrictions were odd.

THAC0 isn't hard to figure out, just counter-intuitive for no reason.
THAC0 is stupid and the only improvement I saw when 3.0 came out was changing it.
Which is why I never converted.
Because fuck buying all new books just to keep playing D&D.

While 2e is something of a rehash edition, the quality is astounding. The game comes in solid boxes, filled with professional quality artwork and fold out maps.

One incident that haunts me to this day is when I walked into a KB Toys and they were liquidating their AD&D2e inventory. Unfortunately, no matter how cheap it was (we're talking under 3 bucks a box), I was a kid and had no money! All I walked out with were 2 Dark Sun modules.

...

I get why only humans can dual class - humans are supposed to be the most adaptable race. There are no second acts in elven or dwarven lives. But why the hell can't humans multiclass?

Many nonsensical things in AD&D have no stated reason and the only guy that could give one has been dead for years.

Kind of baffling. The indication is that Dual classing is supposed to be "better" and replaces Multi. But it....isn't.

Just an example of how fucked dual classing is. If you make a wizard and then dual class into fighter, all levels remain d4 HD with maximum +2 con bonus until you exceed those levels, then your new levels will get the new HD (unless you already reached the point where HP gains become static, whoops). Multiclass gives you an average. So if you make a wizard into fighter dual class character you are strictly doing it wrong from a crunch perspective.

It's amazing how many fucking idiots there were out there, even those steeped in old-school gaming back in the day, who couldn't figure out this simple math.

You can see how a system where a +1 sword goves you -1 to THAC0 and +1 armor goves you -1 AC could be seen as intentionally obtuse.

I love ADnD2e, it was my first RPG way back when.

If you're asking for overall criticism, there's the whole D20 thing first and foremost. It's a very constricting system with almost no narrative consistency. Combat is arduous to resolve and the result is usually hard to explain. It's also all the game ever does. But that's D20 for you, and probably not what you were asking about.

Within the context of Editions, ADnD2e is a sanitized version. As a reaction to all that satanism media frenzy they made really sure to remove any real world reference or symbolism, any bloody rituals, etc. making the whole scope of the game pretty juvenile while the mechanics were not.

As a publication history it's a second break in the whole Gygax v TSR debacle. ADnD was supposed to be Gygax's line where he could develop his ideas TSR deemed too involved for their target audience of teenagers. But for the second edition Zeb Cook was put in charge. I don't know how amicable this was, but it meant Gygax was out of DnD.

>not muh 1e

and/or

>too many broken splats

Those are the main complaints.

Now, since experience tables were based on your current class and not your total class levels, would a dual-class character have more total levels and thus more HP than a single-classed character with the same amoint of total xp? I know they solve this for multiclass characters by having each class level only grant a fraction of the usual amount of hp

Nope. It "remembers" your old class (you can actually use it at any time, but when its inactive you forfeit all xp gain for the encounter if you do). You don't gain new HP until the level of your new class exceeds that of your original class. At that point, the original class "re-activates" and you gain all your abilities back.

So a dual classed fighter-mage or fighter-cleric, once fully "activated", is a killing machine. But the point of the game is the journey, not the destination. And, as I said, if you do not choose fighter as your original class, you are doing it wrong, which is terrible for roleplaying.

Ok, I see where this is being confusing now that I read my own comment.

You lose all spells, proficiencies, thac0, abilities, etc of the in-active class but NOT HP. That remains.

Jesus Dual Classing is a clusterfuck. Stick to multi, kids.

So they'll actually have fewer hp than a single-classed counterpart with the same total xp, because a lot of a dual-classed character's xp is spent on levels that grant no hp at all.

"Yes, but..."

Remember that HPs plateau in 2e and the way the XP tables work. A good point to dual a fighter, for example, would be level 7. And that point, you're what, 2 levels away from the plateau anyway?

So it isn't really crippling.

>Compare that to the Thief a class that spends most of its career failing at its niche 40-50% of the time usually requires two rolls on things that are DEATH to fail has a THAC0 of "miss" and an AC of "Hit everytime" and has one offensive ability that can only be used out of combat
I liked playing a thief (and dwarven fighter/thief) in 2e... But that being said I was highly specialized in open locks and f/r traps. I never cared about pick pocket, climb walls base was good enough for me, never really used that reading one you get at level... 4? and I didn't sneak off ahead too much.

Not when you instead add those bonuses to your roll (for the sword) instead of removing from your THAC0.

AC I'll give you, but I don't really remember getting much magic armor myself so I don't think about it. Closest thing I can think of that I encountered were bracers which just said what AC they were.

Yeah, thieves level VERY fast and those skill points should be specialized. Sounds like he spread them all out, which you can't afford to do. Jack of all trades; failure and killed by guards. Or something.

>THAC0
This idiot misconception needs to end.

THAC0 did not originate in 2e. THAC0 originated in oD&D. And there is a reason: it is a formulae for finding the numbers on the attack tables. It is the same to-hit system that every edition of TSR D&D used. It was included in the PhB in 2e, but it had been a ubiquitous houserule since 1979. Which is why it was included in the PhB.

You can offer valid criticisms of THAC0 (maybe). You cannot offer the existence of THAC0 as a valid criticism unique to 2e.

>a game about building broken characters

If you have to limit choices because the people with whom you play would build broken characters then you need to find a new group.

>It's also boring as hell.
if you don't like dungeon crawling, I don't think dungeons and dragons is the game for you

Thank you god, someone intelligent.

My buddies and I picked up a bunch of 1e and 2e core books and started having some fun games, but the combat system in 1e was confusing the fuck out of me because my older friend was always talking about THAC0.

The monsters for 1e manuals don't even have THAC0 so I was asking "how the fuck do you roll to hit?" After a bit of searching, I found the giant multi-page combat tables in the 1e DM Manual and, lo and behold, there's the fucking THAC0, same numbers and same system.

2e just literally named it "THAC0" while using the exact same tables, and it's very simple and not confusing at all.

It's actually nice for more casual players as they can easily calculate what they hit and what hits them without 3e combat rules avalanche.

>THAC0 originated in oD&D.
I don't think so.

"May have been in use as early as 1980" is borderline between OD&D and AD&D, and really too close to say definitively.
The DMG for Advanced had come out, but not everyone moved over right away.

(Basic was still just Holmes, which was really an intro to OD&D.)

>Jesus Dual Classing is a clusterfuck. Stick to multi, kids.
None of the groups I played in ever even acknowledged that dual classing existed, but I think this was more because it was conceptually stupid rather than mechanically clumsy. "My character has an excellent THAC0 and I can use it any time I want to, but I have to use a terrible, starting THAC0 if I want to actually earn XP."

Still, multiclassing has its share of problems. It's significantly overly powerful at many points. Would you rather be a 10th level fighter or a fighter 9 / wizard 10? Because it requires the exact same number of XP to get those. And keep in mind that since only demi-humans can multiclass, you're adding racial abilities on top of that which humans don't have.

Of course, once you hit name level, and the XP requirements quit doubling every level, multiclass characters fall far behind. Instead of being roughly a level behind in both of their classes most of the time, their classes advance at only half the rate of a single class character. And at some point you hit the dreaded level cap, which has to be the stupidest way of balancing characters because it either doesn't apply at all (because you aren't high enough level yet) or it completely shuts you down. Of course, the level caps in 2e are high enough that the former is usually going to be more of a concern than the latter.

It doesn't give as many neckbeards stiffies as the OSR stuff. That's why it doesn't get talked about.

I don't think you can say that something originated in a game it never appeared in, regardless of what may or may not have been happening in a few private games in the Lake Geneva area. Besides, the AD&D DMG gave stats for monsters with a column for "To Hit A.C. 0", which is the basis for THAC0, even if it doesn't use the acronym.

is responding to

Well, that's the thing, it didn't originate in a published game, it originated as a houserule circulating among people playing the game.
Making it official in 2e was just finally acknowledging that players out in the wild had grown to prefer using that to lookup tables.

On average you end up only one or two levels ahead at best compared to the rest of the party.Bards actually get a much bigger benefit since it keeps their spell progression in line with other casting classes

Thief skills tend to suck yeah but specializing and never using certain ones helps while race bonuses make Dwarven F/T king for previously mentioned reasons.Theres still the double roll problem of roll to find THEN Remove traps that also kills you on stealth with Hide/Move [barring Elven boots].Once you get to higher levels the rolls actually become trivial but the base class doesn't contribute meaningfully outside of Locks/Traps which tend to become less important as the tomb robbing becomes less of a thing

That's too hard. This is easier:
My THAC0 is 15. I roll a 12. I hit AC 3 or worse.
My THAC0 is 15. I roll 19. I hit AC -4 or worse.
My THAC0 is 15. I roll a 13 + 2 for my magic sword = 15. I hit AC 0 or worse.

THAC0 - roll after bonuses/penalties = AC hit.

This is how I always calculated it. The benefit is that the player doesn't need to know the enemy's AC to know whether he hit or not.

THAC0 and the d20 mechanic are interchangeable. They're just different ways of solving the same equation, and it's pretty easy to convert one to the other.

And here's what things look like once they've been calculated...

If you don't see a 2e thread, is because there's no big reason to 2e bitching.

Veeky Forums as individuals can offer great insight on how to solve pitfalls and enjoy some gud gameplay, but as mob just doesn't work in the same way.

Making -"deliberate, blatantly obvious, in an unmistakeable manner even for the layman"- posts to provoke edition wars should be considered grounds for a permaban IMO.