It is like magic and fairies and rainbows and gumdrops and dragons that'll actually kick all y'all's asses and unicorns...! It is my favoritezes edition everz!

It's filled with settings and ecologies and tour guides and needless histories and fanfic Mary Sue adventure logs and umpteen compendia of magic spells and pretty art with infinite aqua net hairspray and huge breaks from dungeons into paladins and princesses and bureaucracy and thieves guilds and math magic and playing a goblin in a reverse dungeon siege and tables and table and more tables!

It's my shiny.

im noticing a runing theme here of people basing a large part of there opinion on the high numbers of class options on both sides. You dont see that much for 3e although i suppose that falls under the standard wha i dont like new books with new content complaints.

Something i fell needs special mention is the going back on initial plans for clases, for 3e prestige classes were meant to be built around organisations or campaigns , this of course was prety much imidently abandoned and we are all the better for it. Thats not to say such prestige classes are bad but specialtys are also good.

The moment Classes stop being treated as Classes and start being treated as specialized occupations is the downfall of any edition of D&D.

90% like 1st edition AD&D, but stick to the three core books because practically all the rest is crap.

PS: the DMG was mostly inane stuff IMHO, probably the worst DMG in the history of D&D

Quote from: TristramEvans;829589The moment Classes stop being treated as Classes and start being treated as specialized occupations is the downfall of any edition of D&D.

Yeah. That's what kits, backgrounds, subclasses and so on Are for.

Quote from: Opaopajr;829584It is like magic and fairies and rainbows and gumdrops and dragons that'll actually kick all y'all's asses and unicorns...! It is my favoritezes edition everz!

It's filled with settings and ecologies and tour guides and needless histories and fanfic Mary Sue adventure logs and umpteen compendia of magic spells and pretty art with infinite aqua net hairspray and huge breaks from dungeons into paladins and princesses and bureaucracy and thieves guilds and math magic and playing a goblin in a reverse dungeon siege and tables and table and more tables!

It's my shiny.

Well put! :cheerleader:

It only really went to poo after Player's Option or so. The earlier sourcebooks have heaps of good stuff.

Complete Fighter: kits, weapons, awesome rules for combat manuevers - trips, disarms, called shots. And yay rules for perception checks

Complete Wizard: the spells are mostly filler, but it has some excellent campaign material stuff in here, from wizard organisations to wizard diseases.

Complete Psionics: people love this or hate this, but its at least interesting. They balance psi better than 1E by making it a character class (a few characters still get 'wild talents', but more limited), and its substantially different to magic (unlike 3E, where you just get ectoplasm-flavoured fireballs).

Complete Thief: again, good campaign ideas and material. The kits are skills are pretty good, not too unbalanced here. Thief equipment is kinda interesting too.

Complete Priest: eeh its OK. Downpowers the cleric a bit, mostly RP stuff you didn't need.

Complete Bard: adds a whole new dimension to bards, since a bard kits switches out maybe half a core bard's class features or so, and sometimes allows different races or multiclass combinations.

Complete Ranger: mostly forgettable and meh (Rangers could already take fighter kits, for instance) although the 'demi-ranger' rules let you make halfling Explorers and such so are handy.

Complete Barbarian: superfluous and cheesy.

The race books are kind of where it starts to jump the shark, maybe you do want to avoid those, since that's where it suddenly becomes OK to add kits to multiclass characters (which had been helpful in balancing single- and multi-class characters previously), and since the power creep of those kits was way up (e.g. the Dwarf Champion for fighter/cleric or the Elf Bladesinger for fighter/mages).

Priest's Handbook is actually awesome, however the specialty priests do need some powering up but that's fairly easy to do.

For the Player's Options books, Combat & Tactics present better versions of the maneuver etc rules from Fighter's, and makes some Nice changes to weapons etc.

PO material really should've been labeled DM Eyes Only. That said — and trust me, I've built my share of twinkie munchkins from it — I think a lot of people overstate the issue. If you read thoroughly the caveats, and everyone in the party runs from the same bonkers pool of tools, it works itself out as a different game tone rather than broken. Nothing as egregious as I've seen from WotC.

For example, that Priest using Weapon Mastery with all those Class CP points? Only for one weapon ever, pre-selected at lvl 1, and only becomes available around lvl 5. All those other Class CPs (180)? They only roll over to NWPs, nowhere else. All those "unneeded" Major/Minor Spheres sacrificed? Yeah, that starts to hurt in higher levels.

If Birthright taught me anything it is that spells above 3rd are definitely some of the more eyebrow raising ones. Clever use of 1st thru 3rd, applause, but that higher stuff, wow. (And I'm one who is personally unimpressed with Stoneskin — pff, lasts a round if that, every attack strips a skin, successful or not — so keep that in mind when replying to me on that one.)

But it's all explicitly optional! Turn as much, or as little, of it on as you want. (And backhand the little rules lawyer snot who dares mewls otherwise.) Yay!

PS: The Weapons v. Armor table is blue box optional inside the 2e DMG. Yup, your old toys come back to play in 2e, if you want 'em. And in a handy, dandy cleaner reference format, too!

The historical "green books" (eg.: Age of Heroes, A Mighty Fortress) are my favorite things to come out of 2e. I still look for them as reference material for whichever RPG I'm running.

I find them surprisingly well done. I mean, sure, Google and Wikipedia exist but it's really nice to have all that material in one book put together under the context of "gaming".

Quote from: Justin Alexander;829578The 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.

I agree. One of its chief strengths is the setting line.

Its chief weakness is the DMG, which has a lot of useful stuff but you can read it front to back and have zero idea of how to run or prep a campaign. When I first started playing 2E, the GMs who still had the 1E material seemed a lot less confused about how to run a game. When I went and read the first edition DMG I saw why.

I think part of it is they shifted a lot of that kind of content to the blue book line. There were a couple of key GM advice books in the blue books (I remember the Campaign Sourcebook and Cartography Guide being pretty useful, as was the guide to Villains). Once I had those, it was easier to get my footing as a new GM.

EDIT: That should read Campaign Source Book and Catacomb Guide.

2E?

Pretty much like AD&D without a soul.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;8296172E?

Pretty much like AD&D without a soul.

It traded it in for spirit!

"We got spirit, yes we do! We got spirit, how 'bout you!"
:cheerleader: :highkicks:

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;829615EDIT: That should read Campaign Source Book and Catacomb Guide.

aww you had me all excited about geography for a moment there

Some of my most favorite d&d memories are from 2e.  It's weird, there's things I love about the edition- streamlined, the kits- and things that drive me bonkers- the kits...

2e was probably the edition that got most played for us.  It was also a turning point edition for me personally.  It was the first time where characters started to feel more superheroic.

Quote from: tuypo1;829621aww you had me all excited about geography for a moment there

I think there was some stuff on geography in there (or it was in the Creative Campaigning book). There was also The Castle Guide, The Arms and Equipment Guide, The Complete Book of Villains, and Monster Mythology in that line.