Return to 2nd Edition AD&D

Lately I've been going over all my relevant bookshelf material, trying to box away things I no longer need out to reference. Last night I came up to 2nd Edition AD&D materials and hesitated. I haven't played this version in over 12 years and don't think I ever will again. I sold off most of the splatbooks a few years back at Council of Five Nations and kept only the core book materials. I opened the Player's Handbook and started re-reading....

I had forgotten how far from D&D they had tried to go. Removing half-orc as a race, adding new level limits and class options, renaming classes, making the bard class a part of the game but eliminating monk and assassin, and adding in the precursor to the skill system in 3.0 called non-weapon proficiencies. Only now am I seeing that most of what I hated about 2nd edition was the fact that it WASN'T D&D as I knew it. Yet, in some ways, it harkened back to simpler times of Classic D&D when all the rules fit nicely into one rulebook under 200 pages.

The assassin and monk classes were added by Dave Arneson through his Blackmoor supplement and, although TSR had the rights to Gygax's materials, I'm not so sure about Arneson's. Perhaps that's why these two classes disappeared from 2nd edition altogether. I think it was just that they really had no place in a game in which the players were supposed to be heroic (not to mention the backlash against D&D in the early 1980's from religious groups). So mysticism and brutalistic backstabbing were removed from the game. This left little incentive for making evil characters except for priests and thieves.

Renaming the classes was more or less the least important change made. The main classes kept their flavor regardless. Now we had the Warrior, Priest, Rogue, and Wizard as class groups, with the iconic classes of Fighter, Cleric, Thief, and Mage as prime examples. Paladins, Rangers, Bards, and Illusionists were still intact, but the Druid became an example of a specialized priest. I liked some of the changes made to the Priest class, but the Specialist Wizard classes could have been better thought out. Thieves also suffered a bit in their execution. Bards were a mess - not really able to do much very well and sort of an added class for nostalgic reasons. The classes added by Unearthed Arcana were so broken that they were removed and placed back in as Class Kits in the splatbooks. The 3rd edition Barbarian makes much more sense and could work in a 2nd edition sense. The Cavalier was never a good idea - more of a cultural choice than a class choice since it was dependent on social station, something that never applied to player characters.

The Monster Manual was a complete mess. Although making each monster have its own page in a binder may have seemed like a good idea at the time, it led to a lot of lost monsters and broken half-filled binders that were too big to carry safely to the game. I preferred the later Monstrous Manual with it's normal book binding.

The thing I hated the MOST about 2nd edition was the institution of the Forgotten Realms as the main campaign of the game. I actually liked the 1st edition version of it better than the Drizz't dominated, drow heavy world (with all the family names stolen directly from D3 - Vault of the Drow, a GREYHAWK based publication written by Gygax). The blatant crunch of all things D&D into this world made it more of a mockery than a valid campaign setting. Even the "resurrection" of the Greyhawk campaign left me wanting, since the concepts eliminated a lot of the previously published materials and removed Iuz as the main campaign nasty, and raising the lich Vecna to replace him in importance (a creation of Brian Blume, I believe, and never a part of Greyhawk). The horrors perpetrated to the Greyhawk campaign were written by a number of authors who either never read Gary Gygax's novels and modules, or simply wanted to make something completely different. It showed the lack of creativity that they simply didn't make a NEW world instead of polluting Greyhawk with such horrible plots and NPCs.

Still, the ruleset was robust and capable of supporting hours of game play with only some preparation time necessary to pull it off. I found adlibbing to be extremely easy in this system, so much so that I could weave an adventure with little more than a map, a vague idea of what I needed to happen, and feedback from the players. That was a happy time for me!

So perhaps I can go back into the 2nd edition books and pull out some gems to use, or perhaps run the game again using the bare bones engine and see about a direct conversion from 1st to 2nd, or from Basic/Expert to 2nd. A game consisting of nothing more than Fighters, Priests, Wizards, and Rogues appeals to me, but of course I would use only Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes, Halflings, and Humans as the character choices without the half-elves or half-orcs. I never agreed with half-breeds being a viable character choice.

2nd edition has enough customization built in to it to allow each base class to seem very different. Using Specialty priests, wizard school specialization, thief ability point selection, and fighter weapon specializations really allows each player to go in the direction they desire. Paladins could be war-like priests, rangers could be rogues or fighters with bow specialization, illusionists and druids are simply versions of the wizard and priest classes, assassins are simply evil thieves that strike from the shadows and use poison, etc. Using the unarmed combat system from 3rd edition would allow for monk-like fighters to exist, or even monk-like priests (which existed in Greyhawk as worshippers of Xan Yae and Zuoken). Yep, this could work very well! Great, another distraction....