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Asimo posted:2e was an absolutely godawful game that was kind of clunky and archaic when it was new and it didn't improve any as it went along. The only good parts of it were the assorted insane campaign settings TSR put out during the edition's extended life and even those tended to get dragged down by the dumb rules. Yeah, the folks that wrote 2e were too afraid to change anything major for fear of alienating fans, and settled for codifying and clarifying the most accepted rules. I think it's at least worth lauding for making AD&D comparatively coherent, but helped ingrain it's mistakes in the hobby for another decade.
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Apr 4, 2017 11:43
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Asimo posted:2e was an absolutely godawful game that was kind of clunky and archaic when it was new and it didn't improve any as it went along. The only good parts of it were the assorted insane campaign settings TSR put out during the edition's extended life and even those tended to get dragged down by the dumb rules. 2E had a lot fewer balance issues than 3E, and the player's options books released during the tail end of the edition's life were legit good within the context of the system. It had a ton of warts, though, I'll give you that. Very few people ran in RAW, and I'm not entirely sure if it was possible to actually do so. Also, there was plenty of groggy butthurt over 3E, just like there was over 4th.
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Apr 4, 2017 12:32
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Asimo posted:There's a reason 3e was so well received. It's easy to forget now that it's old too and everyone has experiences with its flaws, but when it was new it was such a breath of fresh air and competence compared to the 2e rules. I remember that. I sat down with a bunch of AD&D players to play 3.0 and we were all blown away by how smooth it was. Of course, within six months we'd broken the system in every conceivable way. I remember standing with two of the players looking at the huge list of playtesters in the 3.0 rulebook and all of us wondering aloud what they'd been doing.
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Apr 4, 2017 12:40
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The main reason they got to make Hackmaster of course was 'settlement from Dragon Magazine reprinting a shitton of Knights of the Dinner Table without permission in the Dragon Compilation CD.' It's also why the Kingdoms of Kalamar got to use the official D&D logo instead of just the d20 logo.
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Apr 4, 2017 12:43
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potatocubed posted:I remember that. I sat down with a bunch of AD&D players to play 3.0 and we were all blown away by how smooth it was.
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Apr 4, 2017 13:52
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Yeah, the folks that wrote 2e were too afraid to change anything major for fear of alienating fans, and settled for codifying and clarifying the most accepted rules. I think it's at least worth lauding for making AD&D comparatively coherent, but helped ingrain it's mistakes in the hobby for another decade. I have a pet theory that the reason the first wave of narrative-ish games in the 90s (Vampire and all its grimdark coattail-riders) were so surprisingly rules-heavy is that they were being driven mad by AD&D2e. Like, this unbelievably clunky old ruleset was still getting new versions published up until, what, '96? And it was still the premier RPG.
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Apr 4, 2017 14:01
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FMguru posted:The story has always been that the 3.0 playtesters played it like your group did - as an cleaned-up 2E, with the spellcasters serving as fireball/cloudkill/lightningbolt artillery and clerics being healbots. Nobody on the team tried to break the rule from first principles so they didn't notice that a druid turned into a bear was a better melee character than the fighter, or the way that save-or-suck spells ended encounters before the fighter could draw his sword. Presumably they were too busy congratulating themselves on including 'trap' feats like Toughness.
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Apr 4, 2017 14:21
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Evil Mastermind posted:Every time D&D playtesting comes up, all I can think of is the 5e playtest and people saying they bypassed some of the rougher fights via normal player lateral thinking, which is fine in a normal game but isn't how you actually playtest a game. Not that it mattered since they basically threw out any feedback that didn't say "This is the best!"
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Apr 4, 2017 14:23
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Evil Mastermind posted:Every time D&D playtesting comes up, all I can think of is the 5e playtest and people saying they bypassed some of the rougher fights via normal player lateral thinking, which is fine in a normal game but isn't how you actually playtest a game. I remember tales of the many, many pages and hours wasted on Damage on a Miss.
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Apr 4, 2017 14:23
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Evil Mastermind posted:Every time D&D playtesting comes up, all I can think of is the 5e playtest and people saying they bypassed some of the rougher fights via normal player lateral thinking, which is fine in a normal game but isn't how you actually playtest a game. Are you loving kidding me.
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Apr 4, 2017 14:26
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Oh right, addendum. That's fine if you're playtesting an adventure module for one run, but you'd run the fight you skipped a couple of times anyway after.
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Apr 4, 2017 14:28
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gradenko_2000 posted:Are you loving kidding me.
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Apr 4, 2017 14:29
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We got around that fight by "The DM nixed it and gave us some orcs to fight, because gently caress that."
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Apr 4, 2017 14:31
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Evil Mastermind posted:Nope. I think it was the infamous "20 rats" encounter, where the advantage/disadvantage mechanics would have been stress tested, but there were a lot of people going "oh, my group got around that by sneaking past/throwing molotovs/rolling a boulder onto them". Okay so that's two instances now of the 20 rats encounter showing what a loving sham the playtest was. Jesus.
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Apr 4, 2017 14:33
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FMguru posted:The story has always been that the 3.0 playtesters played it like your group did - as an cleaned-up 2E, with the spellcasters serving as fireball/cloudkill/lightningbolt artillery and clerics being healbots. Nobody on the team tried to break the rule from first principles so they didn't notice that a druid turned into a bear was a better melee character than the fighter, or the way that save-or-suck spells ended encounters before the fighter could draw his sword. Presumably they were too busy congratulating themselves on including 'trap' feats like Toughness. I think it's more that they were deliberately trying not to break the game, because you can break D&D through nothing more complex than choosing to play a wizard.
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Apr 4, 2017 14:50
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potatocubed posted:I think it's more that they were deliberately trying not to break the game, because you can break D&D through nothing more complex than choosing to play a wizard. yeah it is kinda funny to say 2E had no balance issues when things like contingencies, projected image, clone etc exist
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Apr 4, 2017 15:08
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So another thing w/r/t 2e: in my experience, the fiercest edition wars concerning it have happened in retrospect. It's something you only see in particularly crusty forums, but some people resent what they see as TSR "chasing" White Wolf and their ilk with a new emphasis on "story" in the PHB rules and in the campaign settings they published. Also, people just hate Lorraine Williams for a lot of reasons both real and imagined. By the by, did anybody here have the 1991 Black Box as their first D&D? It was technically a Basic product, but since Basic had its last gap in the form of the Rules Cyclopedia the same year, it was obviously meant to feed into buying AD&D2e stuff.
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Apr 4, 2017 15:13
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Goa Tse-tung posted:yeah it is kinda funny to say 2E had no balance issues Who said this incredibly dumb thing?
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Apr 4, 2017 15:19
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Falstaff posted:2E had a lot fewer balance issues than 3E, and the player's options books released during the tail end of the edition's life were legit good within the context of the system. It had a ton of warts, though, I'll give you that. Very few people ran in RAW, and I'm not entirely sure if it was possible to actually do so. It is possible to play as RAW. I played in a campaign where we were very careful to play as RAW and not half-remembered house rules. It's less fun to play it but spell components do reduce some of the Wizard power level until you get to higher wealth levels. Then you see Wizards with a train of pack horses. It's not a good way to balance everyone vs wizards at all, but it's better than letting them cast whatever they memorize.
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Apr 4, 2017 15:26
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Halloween Jack posted:So another thing w/r/t 2e: in my experience, the fiercest edition wars concerning it have happened in retrospect. It's something you only see in particularly crusty forums, but some people resent what they see as TSR "chasing" White Wolf and their ilk with a new emphasis on "story" in the PHB rules and in the campaign settings they published. Also, people just hate Lorraine Williams for a lot of reasons both real and imagined. That was my first game. I actually found a copy on ebay the other day for $30, so I've gone back to my roots. The way they introduced new players to the game in the "Dungeon Card Learning Pack" was brilliant, and I'm looting it wholesale for my own stuff.
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Apr 4, 2017 15:28
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From my point of view, the biggest check on wizard power pre-3e is that the DM determines what spells are actually available.slap me and kiss me posted:That was my first game. I actually found a copy on ebay the other day for $30, so I've gone back to my roots. The way they introduced new players to the game in the "Dungeon Card Learning Pack" was brilliant, and I'm looting it wholesale for my own stuff.
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Apr 4, 2017 15:29
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I don't know that anybody claimed that AD&D didn't have balance issues period, but I would agree with the more qualified statement that the balance was better in many respects compared to 3e.
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Apr 4, 2017 15:34
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gradenko_2000 posted:I don't know that anybody claimed that AD&D didn't have balance issues period, but I would agree with the more qualified statement that the balance was better in many respects compared to 3e. 2E had balance issues, but as far as I can tell they weren't in the same order of magnitude as the ones in 3.0/3.5 (killing gods by hurling planets at them, one-hit killing the Tarrasque, that sort of thing).
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Apr 4, 2017 15:56
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Melee combatants were also a lot better at shutting down casters in 1E and 2E. There was no such thing as a Concentration check, fighters were very "sticky," and attacks of opportunity (which weren't actually called that) allowed for a full attack routine rather than a single attack. Given that hp totals tended to be a lot smaller, that was devastating to a wizards who were unlucky enough to find themselves toe-to-toe with an enemy swordfighter. Also IIRC, any amount of damage dealt to a caster during the round prevents that caster from getting off a spell for the remainder of that round. Contingency notwithstanding, of course.
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Apr 4, 2017 16:08
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Falstaff posted:Melee combatants were also a lot better at shutting down casters in 1E and 2E. There was no such thing as a Concentration check, fighters were very "sticky," and attacks of opportunity (which weren't actually called that) allowed for a full attack routine rather than a single attack. Given that hp totals tended to be a lot smaller, that was devastating to a wizards who were unlucky enough to find themselves toe-to-toe with an enemy swordfighter. Also IIRC, any amount of damage dealt to a caster during the round prevents that caster from getting off a spell for the remainder of that round. There was a Concentration proficiency in the High Level book IIRC, but regardless getting half your actions shut down by anyone with a bow is not fun
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Apr 4, 2017 16:13
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I do wonder if there're people who'd still be willing to play full-up AD&D Combat & Tactics rules
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Apr 4, 2017 16:14
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Well that was kind of the problem. Losing your turn because you got hit is not fun. Tracking dozens of material components is not fun. Stepping into a water trap and rolling separate saving throws for each one of those material components to see how many of your spells you've lost...is not fun. But then they just cut out those checks on wizard power, instead of replacing them with something better, or balancing magic in the first place, and that was very not fun for non-casters.
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Apr 4, 2017 16:15
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ProfessorCirno posted:So, this is one of the issues with Essentials. Nobody knew what it was supposed to be. Is it just more splats? Is it a replacement for the core books and the new evergreen? Is it 4.5? Etc, etc, etc.
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Apr 4, 2017 16:22
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Oh man 2d6 Feet in a Random Direction. I haven't thought about that in ages. Such a good show.
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Apr 4, 2017 16:29
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Ewen Cluney posted:I remember in a podcast the guys from Endgame Oakland (once of the best game stores ever) mentioned that none of their customers had quite the same idea of what Essentials was even supposed to be. There was some good stuff within it, but the whole thing suffered from a muddled marketing perspective, plus the thing that it mostly went after non-problems and totally ignored the actual issues with 4e that needed fixing. If it had substantially overhauled skill challenges and rituals, given characters more interesting non-combat abilities, killed feat taxes, etc. it could've accomplished something worthwhile. But the D&D team apparently had neither the interest nor the necessary design skills to pull that off. This is in keeping with the very weird and inconsistent view of D&D that Mearls, Cook, and others laid out in articles they published during Next's development process, in which they said that the history of D&D design is a history of increasingly complex rules from OD&D to AD&D to 3e to 4e. They acted as if the entire Basic product line, which included the all-time biggest-selling D&D release (the Red Box), never existed. That is, until they used the "Basic Rules" name to lend credibility to their free version of the 5e rules.
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Apr 4, 2017 17:20
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Halloween Jack posted:I'm amazed that Robert Schwalb created something as good as Shadow of the Demon Lord, because shortly after leaving WotC, he wrote a blog post in which he made clear that the Essentials team had no understanding whatsoever of the appeal of 4e to its player base. They thought that people played 4e because they liked complicated rules and playing with character creation as a game unto itself. Holy poo poo. Had they never built a wizard in 3.x before? Dear Lord e: or literally any character at all
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Apr 4, 2017 17:25
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Asimo posted:2e was an absolutely godawful game that was kind of clunky and archaic when it was new and it didn't improve any as it went along. The only good parts of it were the assorted insane campaign settings TSR put out during the edition's extended life and even those tended to get dragged down by the dumb rules. I could talk about how messed up 2E is for ages. Like, the flaws in 3E are bad but they take a degree of system knowledge to appreciate; 2E is just straight up bugfuck insane.
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Apr 4, 2017 17:26
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I still believe 2E is the better experience only because 'being crazy powerful' isn't intrinsically gated behind being a spellcaster Though hindsight being what it is 2e and 3e are both just kinda bad
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Apr 4, 2017 17:31
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Part of 2e's problem was they never threw anything away, so you had poo poo like NWPs sitting right next to the rules for Secondary Skills (essentially nonadventuring job skills) with little notice that you're supposed to use one or the other. It didn't help that the entire chapter was labeled optional but if you didn't use it Fighters fell way behind the damage curve as they leveled because they didn't have weapon specialties without weapon proficiencies.
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Apr 4, 2017 17:37
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The 2e era did not have overall creative/design direction. So you might see two authors, working on books in different product lines, creating two different optional subsystems to accomplish the same goal. This gets apocryphally blamed on Lorraine Williams, but it turns out that the rumours about her banning playtesting from the office and suchlike are not true at all. S.J. posted:Holy poo poo. Had they never built a wizard in 3.x before? Dear Lord
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Apr 4, 2017 17:57
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AD&D 2e was just broken in entirely different ways, and it's not as recognized these days because it never got the same level of Internet number-busting that d20 did. But classes and races weren't balanced (hey, thief), to say nothing of kits. And things got really crazy if players got their hands on the class creation rules or Skills & Powers. And forget trying to figure magical item distribution or enemy challenges. Yeah, spellcasters are better balanced, but they're still busted, it's just a matter of degree.
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Apr 4, 2017 18:14
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Alien Rope Burn posted:AD&D 2e was just broken in entirely different ways, and it's not as recognized these days because it never got the same level of Internet number-busting that d20 did. But classes and races weren't balanced (hey, thief), to say nothing of kits. And things got really crazy if players got their hands on the class creation rules or Skills & Powers. And forget trying to figure magical item distribution or enemy challenges. At one point in my AD&D2e days I had to ban Skills & Powers because it was just as broken as 3e multiclassing was in the right hands. Honestly I want somebody to take 4e, fix the math, remove the feats/feat taxes, and rerelease it, but I know that's not going to happen.
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Apr 4, 2017 18:29
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I could talk about how messed up 2E is for ages. If you'd like to actually do that, maybe in the chat thread, I'd love to read it.
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Apr 4, 2017 18:34
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potatocubed posted:I think it's more that they were deliberately trying not to break the game, because you can break D&D through nothing more complex than choosing to play a wizard. "I was a 3e playtester, and this is almost entirely true. Playtesting was strongly focused on problems the players saw in 2e, and in 2e, the big thing was damage spells and stuff like Stoneskin. Worse, like 95% of the playtesting corps was drawn from Living City, and in Living City, everybody had simply accepted that caster supremacy was the way things were and should be. The campaign was something like 45% wizards, 45% clerics, 9% other casters, and 1% noncasters. If you were playing a fighter or thief, people would just ask you when you intended to dual class, not if you were going to. It was a given, because no matter what people like to say about fighters having a niche in 2e, it simply wasn't true in practice, especially once splats started coming into it. Edit: Also, if you think casters were bad as printed, you should see some of the poo poo we kept from getting to print." This was posted here on SomethingAwful sometime around 6 JUN 2016.
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Apr 4, 2017 18:36
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Halloween Jack posted:Well that was kind of the problem. Losing your turn because you got hit is not fun. Tracking dozens of material components is not fun. Stepping into a water trap and rolling separate saving throws for each one of those material components to see how many of your spells you've lost...is not fun. But then they just cut out those checks on wizard power, instead of replacing them with something better, or balancing magic in the first place, and that was very not fun for non-casters. Yeah, the biggest problem with 3rd is that most of their solutions exacerbated other problems - the checks and balances for casters were, as you say, not fun at all if you're playing a caster. One of the biggest problems with Fighters in 2nd is that they were so incredibly samey. Two fighters of equal level wouldn't be particularly distinct. (Unless you were playing with class kits, in which case may God have mercy on your soul.*) So, 3rd gives Fighters plenty of customization options... Except that plenty of these options were things that were built-in to vanilla 2E Fighters, so in the end it's a nerf to a class that really didn't need nerfing in the first place. 3rd absolutely brought some much-needed changes to the game, doing away with plenty of nonsensical, awkward, or contradictory rules. Unfortunately, the devs didn't seem to understand what the previous editions of the game were designed to do, or where those rules' strengths lay, so the final result is both prettier and messier. * This is me, right here. Had all the class books and played with kits. gradenko_2000 posted:I do wonder if there're people who'd still be willing to play full-up AD&D Combat & Tactics rules With the right group and a sufficient supply of rum, I'd do it. I used to have a blast with those rules. These days there are much better options out there for that sort of thing, though, so it would mostly be for the nostalgia (and the aforementioned rum.) Kwyndig posted:Honestly I want somebody to take 4e, fix the math, remove the feats/feat taxes, and rerelease it, but I know that's not going to happen. It would be nice, yeah. 4E is one of the best iterations of the game, depending on what you're looking for from D&D. (Red Box is, imho, the other option if you're coming at D&D from a more dungeoneering aspect.) The Essentials line complicates a hypothetical 4E reprint though, since it's the most recent version.
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Apr 4, 2017 18:44
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