Somehow I skipped it, going straight from 1E to 3.5E, many years later.

Was it good? I’m familiar with the settings (Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Planesacape, etc) so there’s no need to go into those. I’m specifically looking for feedback concerning the system itself.

The style of play I’m interested in is low-level with the classic races and classes. Imagine one part Game of Thrones, one part Middle Earth, and a dash of Skyrim.

Are there any 2E retro-clones? A google search turned up “Myth and Magic” and “For Gold and Glory” but both of the websites are 404 (what happened there?)

At this point, I’m thinking of hacking Stars Without Number or using 3.5 E6. Is it worth finding a used copy of the 2E rules on Ebay? Is there a legal PDF for sale? Or should I look for another system?

Edit: By "another system" I'm specifically looking for an OSR retroclone, not Runequest, Gurps, Hero, etc.

The system is a very natural progression from 1e, largely just cleaned up and streamlined. I grew up playing with the 2e Player's Handbook and 1e DM's Guide. Ultimately they were about 90% compatible. The system was perhaps the best supported gameline of all time. The options were endless, but nothing was essential to the game beyond the core books. There was perhaps a greater focus on games taking place outside of dungeons than the previous games. Most of my issues with it in comparison to !e are aesthetic in nature (the game was essentially bowdlerized to distance itself from the Satanic Panic of the 80s).

There was, essentially, a "2.5 edition" later on, with the Players Option & Skills & Powers books. Id abandoned D&D by that point so never really explored them. The something-Handbook books were a mixed bag, some exceptional, most at least decent. Kits added a lot of flavour w/o bogging the game down in a hundred classes/prestige classes.

2e was "my" edition. As in, I played the shit out of it when it was live.
In fact, I lost a huge chunk of my rpg stuff in various moves, but have been replacing some stuff. And I bought a 2e PHB and DMG at my local gaming shop, used but in very good condition (glossy covers, little to no wear) for 8 buck apiece. I had to settle on the 2nd printing (black cover) Monstrous Manual tho, but the content aren't different, like the black cover PHB and DMG.
Anyway.

System. Uses THACO. I will probably convert it to ascending because it's super easy to do. Subtract THACO from 20, subtract AC from 20. Done.
6 saves instead of the three. non-weapon proficiencies are optional, but highly supported by the rulebooks, and not a tack-on. HP are very low, 1 dice at 1st level. Probably a good idea to let characters have the max possible instead of rolling the die at 1st level. And probably use some kind of "death's door" option.

The system can get pretty clunky if you include the brown cover options books. Piling on kits and psionics and crap. Just keep an eye on it and include them only if you're serious about using them.

I'm currently brewing up a 2nd ed campaign based on young adult fantasy, taking inspiration from Prydain Chronicles, The Hobbit, Dark Crystal, Willow, that kind of feel. Hopefully I'll get a group together soon to run it.

My personal opinion is that 2nd ed is the sweet spot for complexity, but like I said, that's probably because it was the edition I played the most.

More or less 1st edition but edited so things were in the right place and easier to find.  Added non-weapon specialization (skills, basically) from Oriental Adventures so you could customize your PC. Let thieves decide which skills to emphasize rather than all be the same at every level.  Allowed various schools of magic so you could specialize as a wizard. But if you knew 1st Ed., there was really nothing very different or new to learn.

Never seen or played 3rd+ so can't compare to those versions.

Myth and Magic I believe had pre-orders of a print version, then never delivered. Consequently everyone hates them.

2E 'core' is just a cleaned up 1E with stuff from all the supplements piled into the core - skills, weapon specializations, ability checks, higher level limits for demihumans. Core-only doesn't have the in-practice simplicity of 1E or the build madness of 2E, but is more customizeable than the former and more balanced than the latter. If you like huge piles of optional crap it totally has you covered as well (enough sourcebooks and you can build anything).

Disjointed, bland, finicky, and broken mostly.  I often joke that the people who wrote it obviously didn't play D&D.  Really, I'd point the finger at a corporate mandate over ruling the good judgement of otherwise good game designers.  It needed to clean up more things and not make new bloody messes in others.  Just like every other new edition of every other game.

Not that there weren't good bits in there but it didn't go far enough in some places and went too far in others.  My favorite iteration of D&D is XXVc. which is a science fiction variant that actually cleaned up many things in many places.

My big beefs are that they kept the first edition weapon damages while ditching the weapon verses armor table.  I'd prefer weapon damage by size and usage specific traits that give you a reason to use the weapons the way they were used but that's probably asking too much.  At least some pole arms did get a trip or snag ability if I remember right.

Longbows became insane super weapons (2d4 + Strength bonus twice a round in the most extreme case) and elves were simply better than everyone else (Infravision, +1 with long bows and longswords, silent movement and hiding bonuses.  Weapon speed was changed into an initiative modifier, I think that was an attempt at weapon balance but give me the 1e sequence any day.

Really, they at least needed to make all pole arms 1d12 damage, light crossbows 1d10, and heavy crossbows 1d12.  If you keep long bows at 1d6 they could be 1d8 and 1d10 though.

They probably should have given first level wizards bonus spells like clerics while they were at it.

Non-weapon proficiencies should have been stat % rather than d20 roll under.  You can do it the other way but personally I'd like the diminishing returns drop at higher levels somehow.

They should have thrown humans a bone.  Because it's really the game where nobody plays humans because they're just worse than everyone else.  Since they're single class traditionally in D&D I'd have given them a +1 to the most important thing in their class, to hit for fighters, to first level spells for magic-users and clerics (I'm always in favor of more spells for first level magic-users) +5% to one thieves ability (maybe pick pockets as many started out as street urchins).  Level limits and percentage experience bonuses should have been ditched out of hand.

For all that a singularly superior game to third or fourth edition.

Nobody ever played elves in my games...it was pretty humanocentric...thus the statement above is shown to be hyperbolic opinion.

In any case, if I were to play now I'd use 1st as I gave away 2nd in the mid-90s.

It's hyperbolic opinion that elves got +1 to hit with long bows and long swords, infravision, bonuses to hide in shadows and move silently and were able to play multiple classes at the same time?  While humans only got unlimited advancement at the point when the game system was only handing out a couple extra hp per level?  More spells for magic users sure but in second edition everyone else is basically maxed out by the time level limits kick in.

I'm not saying you weren't having fun.  But even without The Complete Book of Elves.  Elves were pretty broken.

Quote from: David Johansen;829544It's hyperbolic opinion that elves got +1 to hit with long bows and long swords, infravision, bonuses to hide in shadows and move silently and were able to play multiple classes at the same time?  While humans only got unlimited advancement at the point when the game system was only handing out a couple extra hp per level?  More spells for magic users sure but in second edition everyone else is basically maxed out by the time level limits kick in.

I'm not saying you weren't having fun.  But even without The Complete Book of Elves.  Elves were pretty broken.

But that is basically the same as 1e right.... especially if you use the UA level limits or try to actually work out a non gamist reason why they exist...

2e was a brave experiment that ultimately failed due to the pressures of fans.

The idea was to pare 1e back to a streamlined core system where emphasis was put on role play over mechanical variation.

This is most obvious in the class model. AD&D had boomed in terms of class mechanics with UA and with all the various psuedo offical Dragon magazine classes. 2e tried to strip this back to just 4 classes with all the subclasses and hybrids rolled out as options but they bottled it.
At the start 2e made the assertion that a barbarian was just a fighter from a less technological culture (norse, celtic, Mongol whatever) compared to the Euro medieval norm. They followed the same logic for ninja, samurai, illusionists, assassins, etc. And kits were added as a way of providing roleplay based detail without massive rules bloat.
However, they didn't have the courage to drop paladins, rangers or druids and later renaged on some of the progress they made.

The idea is excellent but fans want vast muber of classes all with their own mechanical variants so it was probably doomed.

Outside of this they did simplify and clean up the system and the organisation but its 95% AD&D.
THACO is just a way to remove the use of a look up table with a straight roll vs a target recorded on the players charcter sheet. Ascending AC is a much better fix for this.
It removed a load of stuff most people never used, weapon vs armour (faulted as it was expressed as AC not actual armour type), demi human level limits (make sense as a gamist way to promote humans as a the dominant species but make no sense either in play, where few groups progress to levels where the limits work, or in world building where immortal and naturally magical elves are limited in level to a human with 2 years adventuring experience), psionics, etc but never really did a good job of filling the gaps the lack of these rules opened up.

2e introduced the rule book treadmill that UA had hinted at with the Complete series. Now the early ones are great and differentiating classes based on roleplay not mechanics (early Kits get an extra weapon proficiency and a roleplay based reaction modifier or similar - a bit like backgrounds in 5e, but they don't get a whole new set of mechanics with different bells and whistles). Later ones got outof hand and made the error they were trying to fix, due tot eh demand of fans for new mechanics for certain classes.

2e finally jumped the shark with Skills and Powers, (aka 2.5e). A great idea with possibly the worst implementaion of any RPG idea in the history of stuff.


So +s
Kits
Thief skills
Priests (so much more sensible than AD&D Clerics)
Early focus on roleplay over more rules bloat

-s
Wasn't radical enough
Didn't tackle some of the Elephants that still litter the room today (from HP to class and racial balance and beyond)
Was eventually seduced by the Dark Side and commerical profit

I guess I agree with jibba.

2e is essentially "my" D&D. It's more or less a cleaned-up 1e that then expanded more or less uncontrolledly. I like kits, allthough some were unbalanced.

You can pick up the free Myth & Magic Starter kits on rpgnow and the pdf of the full Players Guides.  The printed PG book was finally shipped to almost all backers recently so there are physical copies floating around on the secondary market.  The full GMG art free pdf was released to backers.  I do not know if it is available to the general public.

As to For Gold & Glory the retroclone:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/justen-brown/for-gold-glory/ebook/product-21832476.html

Cheers

2e is the Williams era D&D and not the 2e that Gygax was working on before everything fell apart. That said. It was possibly a better approach than Gary's proposed retooling. But we will never know.  2e was the D&D game that I had a tiny little contribution to due to knowing various folk at TSR at the time.

The big boon was that it was 98% compatible with AD&D. Just some tweaks here and there like THAC0. Or cosmetic changes like renaming the outer planes beings. The other boon to players was that 2e gradually threw wide the doors to play more and more unusual races and the class/kit system allowed for customization without so much excess.

The 2e DMG also had the "Create your own class" rules. Which up till then only BX had enjoyed from the Dragon Magazine article.

Play-wise it played nearly exactly like AD&D. Spells, combat, monsters, etc. A little faster in some respects because there was slightly less mechanics to deal with.

The expansion books were exactly that. Not essential despite what some will to this day rant and cry. All sorts of options that could liven up gameplay. Or be totally ignored. Pretty much every class got a handbook.

This is also the edition where Psionics came to the fore and got vastly more fleshed out.

2e was great because it redid the Bard into an actual viable character class. One that retained its awesomeness through every edition since, except for 4E, which sucked on all levels.

Quote from: Aglondir;829508Was it good? I'm familiar with the settings (Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Planesacape, etc) so there's no need to go into those. I'm specifically looking for feedback concerning the system itself.

The system is virtually identical to 1st Edition. The exceptions basically boil down to:

1. THAC0, which is only a light tweaking on the 1E combat charts while being easier to use,

2. A few high profile shifts in the classes (bards are fixed to work like a normal class, assassins don't exist, etc.)

3. A handful of robust optional modules to expand the system, the most notable of which is the proficiency system (which, AFAICT, was used by virtually everybody playing the game).

In terms of the core rulebooks, the big shifts are in tone and the absence of the glorious mess of campaign building resources that Gygax crammed into the original DMG.

(And by tone I don't just mean changing the names of demons and devils. I mean that 2E generally reduced the fantastical elements of the game. In one notable example, an example using a roc instead becomes an example using a crow.)

Where 2E starts finding an identity of its own is the supplements: The addition of kits through the Complete Handbooks were pretty omnipresent in the campaigns I saw in the early '90s. The Player's Option Books became a de facto 2.5 in the mid-'90s, notably adding a lot of the combat mechanics that would later be refined into 3rd Edition.