I basically sat out the 2e era, at least as far as D&D goes. Re-reading some old Dragon issues, I feel a kind of nostalgia, even though I wasn't taking part at the time. I can see the ren-faire thing going on, plenty of attempts to make play "serious" and with in-depth campaign worlds rather than just dungeon exploration, and so on. There's an attempt to make 2e a generic fantasy toolkit rather than a recognition that D&D is its own thing.

But how was your play at the time? Did you still approach things the way you had with 1e? Did you use one of the manifold TSR settings or a homebrew? Did you feel there was a tension between the rules and the play culture? Were you having a good time or was it starting to wear thin?

Pretty much exactly like O, BX, BECMI and A.

Modules though tended to be more constained. Sometimes too constrained, by the plot. Felt like alot less open roam modules came out in the 2e era. But there were some gems like the whole Darkness Gathering series. One of my favorites of the 2e era.

I think mainly because 2e did not change much with the rules. Least not so drastically things were a slog to convert.

YMMV of course. Im sure someone will wander in with a horror story or three.

Addendum:

From experience as a DM and player at home and at cons the gameplay was overall unchanged. Lots of variance from table to table just like previous and aside from occasional grumbles at THAC0 or Kits it was overall amiable. WMMV horror stories there too Im sure. But at least for me that how it was. The players I picked up for 2e were the same.

Play moved WAAAY out of the dungeon for us. Never really did a straight crawl with 2E. Running B/X devolved into Listen, check for traps, open door, fight or investigate, move on (snooze). Sooooo...

Campaigns became pretty "questy" for us (the "Princesses & Perils" iteration of the game, I guess?). And as we played...

Splatbooks: soooooo many crazy options. So much extra shit out there. We were inundated. Plus, there were new systems with interesting doohickeys like boons & flaws (though not called that, necessarily). We liked the idea, so...

Eventually, a friend and I developed our own game rules, with intent to publish. Was gonna do everything using Adobe which, was, at that time, a new thing.  Sadly, we got into this well before the era of online publishing. Everyone moved off to other states. Gaming died for me for about a decade. I really didn't think about this shit much until after I settled in the area where I now live.

Which gets me to considering how best to answer this question NOW:

As compared to my 2E days (exclusively as a DM):
*I plan shit out a LOT less.
*I focus on episodic stuff.
*Prefer rules light.
*The fewer race/class options, the better.
*Minutiae sucks.
*I say yes a lot more than I used to (pretty much all the time now).
*I appreciate the opportunity to game a lot more, now that it's no longer an expectation.

A few random notes, to be more direct in answering your question:
*We never ran a module straight. Always adapted the thing to some extent.
*All our settings were original.
*No tension between rules and play.
*I owned a ton of supplements, but the best ones, I thought, where the spellcards. Sped up play a lot.

So, that's my ramble-ass reply.

Out of all the d&d versions, we played 2e the most.  Things I remember- it was the beginning of characters becoming super heroes in a way.  The kit bloat got way out of hand.  We had a lot of fun with it.

We did a very railroady thing in Krynn, but after we became a bit tired of the epic story,  the GM did indulge us in a detour as treasure hunters that was more episodic. Think Ray  Harryhausen in Krynn, more or less (or that's how I saw it in my mind's eye). The most memorable session for me, in that tangent, was us going down the ocean on a bell like contraption that trapped air inside to look for a submerged treasure. really not that different from dungeon crawling, but I never got my start in dungeon crawling, so it was a nice novelty.

Quote from: The_Shadow;895765But how was your play at the time?

That was my introduction to RPGs in general.

Back then, it was extra hard to get any rpg-related stuff around here. There weren't shops selling official sourcebooks/accessories, no famous communities, Internet was wild and still somewhat of a peculiarity, so no fancy rpg-related forums, no online help and SRDs. Plenty of time went to flesh-out settings, write adventures and what-not. We learned everything from each other, and considered everything, any wildest idea worth trying, any challenge worth taking, so no matter what we got, we tried that out.

First it was Forgotten Realms, then Al-Qadim, Ravenloft, Darksun, Birthright, Planescape and Spelljammer. Some among these were accepted and played regularly, some didn't get much love. Other settings we invented on our own. 99% of it was crap, including our attempt to recreate Howard's Conan but hell, it was unique, original and damn creative back then.

In a way, it was the best time, even thought nowadays I laugh at people who seem to follow our steps and repeat our mistakes.

Btw...
In comparison: today I'm very picky, I often refuse to read a game or a supplement that looks like crap (I firmly believe that people who use certain fonts should be shot on the spot, and left there to rot, no burial). It takes very little to make me stop reading some book. For example, I think that certain scenarios for Achtung! Cthulhu!, perhaps "The End of the World" or "Fragged Empires" (that I had the opportunity to read lately) aren't worth the paper they are printed on, and yet I realize that back in those weird times, I'd think them absolute pinnacle of design.

Heh. I became old.

Hmm. Our AD&D gaming was very "gonzo". Rarely did a vanilla dungeon crawl after a certain point. It was mostly cramming in starships and superheroes and other strange stuff into D&D. I'd hardly even say we were playing D&D, so much as making up fun shit out of D&D and sometimes rolling dice. We were preteen-young teen age range.

By 2nd edition, we had calmed down a lot. We had campaigns in Dark Sun and Spelljammer, so yeah. The boxed settings were great. We did try to play it a bit more "seriously".

It was more based on worlds, and their specific flavors, than locations.

Just thought of something else I recall about the 2e era- the DM went from carrying around three books to a milk crate and several binders.

I went from Red Box Basic to AD&D 2nd Edition, and there was this one GM who had ALL of the boxes up to Immortal and always tried to get us to play that, but everyone else was into the new shit. I remember a lot of my experience of AD&D 2 was vicarious, through Dragon Magazine or at cons, and in our home game it was either BECMI, with this guy, or if I was GMing I had moved onto RuneQuest. So I felt like we were outside the mainstream, and that my game had moved beyond the splat book circle, but that other GM finally moved onto AD&D 2 and bought everything again. I felt like his thing was tied to what TSR were doing and that my game, which we handed off on, was more evolved. RuneQuest seemed more sophisticated to me. Still does. But I think both of us had been influenced by the ambient gaming thing and were both running pretty railroad-y games, full of grand Quests.

The biggest change for us was that our characters started reaching "name level" in AD&D 1e whenever 2E came out. Suddenly, we had followers, castles and temples to upkeep, alongside dealing with the complexity of managing mini-kingdoms. We were a bit too young to understand how to really run things from that perspective at age 11. Eventually, we got tired of it and stopped playing for a hot minute. However, I ran small mini-games between then, using the old modules.

However, we eventually picked it back up whenever Planescape hit the shelves. That completely turned our game around, as we restarted from scratch. It's also about the time that I began DMing regularly.

We also began using supplemental material from Dragon to create interesting and new classes. We came up with some really wonky stuff. I only wish I still had my old campaign notes from when I was a kid. I mistakenly threw them out during a move many years ago.

It was a magical time of maidens traipsing with unicorns through virginal forests, knights travelling hither and non to battle threats to such flowers of beauty, for honor, faith, and said fair maiden hands... and settings where you could then have killer cannibal jungle halflings, or desert nomad dwarves, or divine right of kings amid a (fairy) realm management. All was well and the lands were at peace, and the garden bloomed with worlds and settings and a thousand beautiful campaign variations. From table to table, it was like travelling to unknown vistas and sipping deep from the well of imaginative life...

/skips off to the horizon

La la la la la!...

It was great fun for a while. I moved from AD&D 1e sort of... Well I still played it with my regular group who I still play with sometimes. Thanks to the Player's Option books, particularly Combat and Tactics, I made extensive use of miniatures and had this horribly micromanaged initiative system which divided combat into segments, particularly useful for characters with multiple attacks. Mostly I used Planescape as a setting.

However, I was also running some Buck Rogers XXVc which used similar rules. Combined with Battlesystem, we had some sweet fleet versus fleet battles.

My original group formed when I got my middle school friends to play through a dungeon I prepped after reading (and playing through the didactic solo adventure in) the D&D Introductory Game "black box." Each of them went off, and picked up a different game, and ran it. But I was the "D&D guy" — and no one bought AD&D; instead, I pestered my dad to get me the D&D Rules Cyclopedia.

Now there were some other kids in our school who played AD&D. They read game novels and went on and on about the Companions of the Lance and Elminster and Drizzt and shit — stuff I was vaguely aware of because I often got to buy Dragon magazine at the FLGS (o halcyon days!). We played a bit of 2e with these guys, but very little; the bulk of our D&D experience was RC.

A few years later, when I was in college, I got into oWoD LARPing (don't ask) for a short time, met a great crowd of enthusiastic gamers (also game novel readers) and as the LARP fizzled we got a regular and pretty epic AD&D 2e game. It lasted for two years and was fairly railroaderrific and definitely a "heroic fantasy" thing (even if my character sat squarely at the roguish threshold of "heroic").

What I gleaned from those two groups is that their AD&D 2e-powered take on D&D, as opposed to my own D&D RC-based games, was more scripted, more "global" (i.e. more "save the world" stuff), more "high fantasy" and more likely to use a published setting or module. Also, I thought it was pretty weak that AD&D had so much cool stuff (race + class, spells, monsters, magic items, insanely awesome settings I knew very little about but loved the covers), and got the lion's share of supplemental material in Dragon, but had no systems for cool stuff like rulership, or mass combat, or building a flying ship.

I do agree there seemed a shift to more wilderness and non-dungeon style adventures. Which was actually a nice change of pace from the often more dungeon-centric older modules. Possibly that was a outgrowth of there being so many and writers wanting to try something different. Or inspired by the few that came before like Isle of Dread.