Over at his Mythlands of Erce blog, Anders H* has a couple of amusing polemical posts defending the honour and goodness of second edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (part one concerns the rules; part two addresses the ‘culture’ of the game).
Second edition AD&D was an edition that I almost entirely skipped. I say “almost” because I played very briefly in a 2e campaign one summer around 1990. However, I never owned any 2e AD&D books during its lifecycle (I bought a few books for the Greyhawk and Planescape settings years later). I had drifted away from AD&D by the late 1980s and did not play role-playing games that regularly during the 1990s. To the extent that I did, it was stuff like MERP, Rolemaster, Call of Cthulhu, Hawkmoon, GURPS, and the like.
I eventually did “play” a lot of 2e AD&D, but only via various computer RPGs, namely, the “Infinity engine” Baldur's Gate games, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment (the latter game motivated me to learn more about the Planescape setting, hence my subsequent purchase of the box set and a few other things). It didn't seem that different from 1e AD&D, at least in terms of the rules (the addition of “kits” seemed to be the main difference).
The hatred directed towards 2e by adherents of 1e AD&D (primarily from grognards grumbling on the internet – not that there’s anything wrong with that!) always struck me as primarily flavour-based. And I share their irritation with 2e’s “purging” of things like assassins, half-orcs, demons, devils, etc., (all things that eventually crept back into the game, however, during the 1990s). Also contributing to this sentiment was some bitterness about TSR’s treatment of Gary Gygax, and the unavoidable fact that 2e AD&D was the first “post-Gygax” version of the game.
There are some rules differences between the two editions, of course, and in my view some favour 2e (e.g., the way thief skills were handled), others 1e (e.g., the presence of a distinct "illusionist" class).
I much prefer the art in the original 1e AD&D books, especially the classic Dave Trampier Player’s Handbook cover. Overall, the 1e art seems “grittier” and less “family-friendly” than the 2e stuff. Trampier’s pictures often looked like etchings from some mysterious past (as did David Sutherland’s epic “Paladin in Hell”). Erol Otus’s pictures looked like visions of an alternate reality.
But in terms of rules, I’m fine with 2e AD&D. I certainly prefer them over 3e (which I’ll never touch again), 4e (which I never played after reading halfway through the PHB), and 5e (which, admittedly, is the “least bad” of the post-TSR versions of AD&D/D&D, but still not my cup of tea). I'd be quite happy to play in a 2e campaign. But if I ever run an “old school” AD&D campaign again, it almost certainly would be (a house-ruled version of) Gygaxian 1e AD&D.
(*Note: Anders H is the author of the excellent Into the Unknown RPG, an “old school” variant of the 5e rules. Check it out! If you’re curious, I go over some of the main differences between ItU and 5e here.)
I played 2nd ed quite a bit in the 90s, but dropped it with an enormous sigh of relief when 3.0 came along, and then dropped that for 4e because I was sick of the bloat 3.5 had led too. 5e I never played past playtesting, which was repellant and tiresome even at that point.
ReplyDelete4e remains my favorite edition to date in large part because it's not just more of the same damn game I'd been playing since 1975, but even that's been supplanted by the much-superior 13th Age (currently headed toward a 2nd edition itself). These days I'd rather play an OGL retroclone (OSE or Swords & Wizardry, most likely) than any actual D&D-branded thing, and even then I'm not up for a campaign, just a faux-nostalgic one-shot. Might be able to bait me into some AD&D 2nd ed for Spelljammer or Planescape or Dark Sun though.
Only thing I really disliked in 2nd was the books full of kits. Really just a sign of things to come, but they were particularly poorly executed and had the additional problem of shedding their bindings at the drop of a hat. TSR's product quality was atrociously erratic throughout the last decade of their existence.
Imagine if TSR put their weight behind BECM instead of 2E. Continue with basic but then revamp Rules Cyclopedia into a hardback book without Monsters and then create a separate Hardback monster book (with AD&D monster content as well as whatever Rules Cyclopedia has). Then retool and bundle AD&D modules into hardback adventures the way 5E does except make them sandbox instead of adventure paths. I don't know if this is just crazy talk but I think it might have worked better than the 2E conversion.
ReplyDeleteI skipped 2E myself, distracting myself with other RPGs during the '90s (mostly World of Darkness and Palladium); however, I *do* own the books and have read them. For me, they have DESIGN issues, not just aesthetic ones...I rather like some (SOME) of the aesthetics.
ReplyDeleteAppreciate you pointing me to Anders's articles (and his blog). Thank you!