1e's DMG and PH were poorly organized and indexed. DMs would often be highly challenged to find "that one rule" in a book or Dragon magazine during a game session. Worse, many rules were poorly presented.

For example, the AD&D 1e initiative and combat system allowed tactical depth. The problem was that nobody's understanding of this subsystem matched anyone else's. Finally, in the 2000s, a guy made a PDF that compiled all of the rules and provided an example combat session conducted under 1e rules as written. In my perspective, this has been the best presentation of 1e's actual initiative and combat system. Based on the PDF having 239 footnotes, I think it's fair to say that most gamers did not want to play that way.  https://idiscepolidellamanticora.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/addict.pdf

In the 1e days, non-weapon proficiencies for classes that did not already have them was a point of interest for many groups.

Gygax was pushed out by the company he founded, TSR.

AD&D 2e was a post-Gygax production that was intended to settle the combat rules, add non-weapon proficiencies, and appeal to a wider market.

1e had a politically incorrect grittiness and openness to many play styles. 1e was Gygax's work of art, his masterpiece, beautiful, terrible, thrilling, maddening, and, if you will, magical. 2e had the flair of a corporate product.

Quote from: overstory on April 16, 2023, 02:28:31 PM
For example, the AD&D 1e initiative and combat system allowed tactical depth. The problem was that nobody's understanding of this subsystem matched anyone else's. Finally, in the 2000s, a guy made a PDF that compiled all of the rules and provided an example combat session conducted under 1e rules as written. In my perspective, this has been the best presentation of 1e's actual initiative and combat system. Based on the PDF having 239 footnotes, I think it's fair to say that most gamers did not want to play that way.  https://idiscepolidellamanticora.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/addict.pdf

The PDF 100% makes my skin crawl.  Obviously, no one reading the PHB and DMG would run initiative anywhere close to this.  The most infuriating part is that the game is built to run in segments, but many of the rules were written by people who didn't seem to know this.

Reading the example section, you can clearly see how many of the AD&D details actually add depth and combat choices, but are also in some cases completely psychotic and disgusting.  It's clear that a cleaned up version of this could be incredibly deep and good, were a game designed around it, rather than this initiative system being hurled, weeping pustules and grasping tentacles and all, at an unsuspecting game system, as appears to have happened.

I always say that my favorites are the 1e DMG, the 2e MM and... my own PHB (used to be 5e but gladly I'm over that now).

2e is bowdlerized, it has a significant change in tone, but overall I find it much better organized then the 1e PHB.

So, liking 1e, in addition to the DMG, must have been flavor: the creativity, Gygaxian prose, etc.

Agreed about the 2e splats, but I didn't think you were supposed to use them all at once.

1E felt like Gary was writing for equals and despite what Gary said it had so many subsystems nobody used it felt built to hack so it became comfortable to run.
2E felt like they were writing to teens and the illustrations and blue highlight colors just emphasized that impression. Also it felt better organized which sort of discouraged hacking the system.

Late to the party, but my hot take on this is this...

1e is more popular due to nostalgia and all the grognards being from that era.

2e "fans" probably come into the hobby around the time that 2e came out (like me), and were never privy to the whole drama behind Gygax being kicked out of his own company, so had no reason to hate TSR or avoid buying newer products. And in my experience at least, 2e-stans were less likely to be slavishly bound to older editions of D&D and more apt to try out other games, so we moved on to other systems eventually, and picked up more recent editions of D&D later on rather than insist on sticking with 2e forever, so there wasn't the same kind of market for 2e retroclones when the OSR became a thing that there was for 1e retroclones, because the 2e audience was not obsessed with old D&D.

I do miss the class and race splat books and campaign settings, though. Not the Player Options stuff, though, that's around the time 2e started to go downhill. And I was the target audience for that kind of stuff, but I thought that Player's Options was so poorly implemented I never used it, and ended up trying to create my own version of it instead, cuz I liked the basic idea behind buying up class features and such. But RAW it was so poorly balanced and messy, like that rushed that thing to market without testing it out.

I'm not really a D&D guy (Runequest and Rolemaster were games I ran back in the day) but 2nd edition is the only D&D that I have some nostalgia for since another GM used that. We did have some good campaigns, but I always thought some of the rules were a bit wonky. Of course no game is perfect. For a good while we were in a large city on the western coast of some continent (one of the big ones, Grayhawk?) looking for some....hidden dragons or something? (No crouching tigers though) Anyone know this one?

Quote from: Baron on April 10, 2023, 02:43:29 PM
Snagged this doc off the net, for those who would be interested in a four-page item-by-item list of differences between 1e and 2e:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Z3QfPF9TbCoWL7YqWNjjQcdwDpNd6jix/view?usp=sharing

That's a handy list.  Thank you.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 10, 2023, 09:15:25 AM
I had the opposite problem. There's this very simple toolkit that I think is more or less perfect for what I want to do, but I'm paralyzed by the amount of choice

Remove the choice. Roll the dice. Hexcrawl.

I think it's probably because 1e was the edition of D&D when D&D was at its most popular, at least until recently. There may well be more people who stopped playing 1e before 1989 than started playing 2e through its entire run. 2e was the edition that was running when TSR went bankrupt.

So if you have people coming back to the game they used to play, it would be 1e. And if they play an edition, it's likely to be the first version they played, or the one that is currently in print.

Quote from: VisionStorm on April 16, 2023, 09:47:41 PM
Late to the party, but my hot take on this is this...

1e is more popular due to nostalgia and all the grognards being from that era.

Your bias is showing again.  I skipped 2E for the exact opposite of the reason you list:  About the time when 2E came out was when I got a little irritated with the way D&D worked and went off and explored other systems in earnest.  I'd dabbled before that.  It took all that time during the 2E run to learn that there were things about D&D I really liked better.  Objectively.

Quote from: Svenhelgrim on April 10, 2023, 02:36:03 PM
When I see people talking about Gygax's "poor game design" I have to laugh.  This motherfucker was out there on the forefront of gaming for years.  It's like criticizing the guy who invented the wheel because it didn't have spokes in it so it was a poor design. 

For me, he is a good game designer.  His organizational skills leave a lot to be desired.

His games are still very playable and fun.

Quote from: zer0thSo, pushed by another thread talking about AD&D 1st edition and not wanting to hijack that thread, I would like to ask: Why people prefer 1st edition over 2nd edition when it comes to AD&D?

Because it's objectively better in every way that really matters. 

Quote from: Chainsaw on April 17, 2023, 12:04:15 PM

Quote from: zer0thSo, pushed by another thread talking about AD&D 1st edition and not wanting to hijack that thread, I would like to ask: Why people prefer 1st edition over 2nd edition when it comes to AD&D?

Because it's objectively better in every way that really matters. 

This.

Quote from: Chainsaw on April 17, 2023, 12:04:15 PM

Quote from: zer0thSo, pushed by another thread talking about AD&D 1st edition and not wanting to hijack that thread, I would like to ask: Why people prefer 1st edition over 2nd edition when it comes to AD&D?

Because it's objectively better in every way that really matters. 

  Better at being Gygaxian D&D, at least. I think VisionStorm has the right of it and those of us who prefer what 2nd Edition was trying to accomplish have drifted towards systems that actually meet those goals, leaving AD&D to those who want the game as envisioned by Gygax.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on April 17, 2023, 01:30:41 PM

Quote from: Chainsaw on April 17, 2023, 12:04:15 PM

Quote from: zer0thSo, pushed by another thread talking about AD&D 1st edition and not wanting to hijack that thread, I would like to ask: Why people prefer 1st edition over 2nd edition when it comes to AD&D?

Because it's objectively better in every way that really matters. 

  Better at being Gygaxian D&D, at least. I think VisionStorm has the right of it and those of us who prefer what 2nd Edition was trying to accomplish have drifted towards systems that actually meet those goals, leaving AD&D to those who want the game as envisioned by Gygax.

Have to agree. As someone who never played either game during their heyday, I look at both editions of AD&D and inevitably think there's some other game I could be playing that brings all the positives, with fewer of the annoyances. Between the two of them, 1e at least has that cache of having been written by Gygax, so maybe it's worth playing just as a historical curiosity. Though as tons of people have pointed out, AD&D1e isn't actually how Gygax played the game at his own table. 

The only thing 2e has going for it (for me at least) is the settings. But I could more easily run them with any of a dozen OSR game I have at my disposal.