jharris wrote on Jan 25th, 2011 at 6:09am:2nd edition is still the one that I consider "real D&D"...sorry, think they keep trying to fix something that "ain't broke".
Yeah 2nd ed wasnt broke unless you were trying to play a balanced cooperative game. House cats killing 1st level characters. uneven level progressions (at 2600 xp rouges will pwn fighters.) Lob-sided effectiveness of characters (after 7th level or go wizard or go home)
The early years were innovative and were a product of those times. It was the era before power-gamers when you could look at a fighter's character sheet and pretty much know if you had to watch their rolls (there were ten times as many 18/00 as 18/01~18/09 combined.)
2nd could only sustain itself with the goodwill of each player and the DM. Nobody cared though, you were just happy to be playing. Woe was the day for ongoing campaigns when the wizard hit 7th level and could merely polymorph any NPC into a newt...yes yes they got better...well sometimes.
OD&D and 1st ed are where I spent most of my game time. For the most part 2nd was a seamless extension of 1st (thaco pfft whatever just roll the 20.) I liked the basic and expert sets a great deal. When the PHB came out wow. I saved lunch money for 2 weeks to buy the Monster manual when it came out... I read it for hours every night for 6 months.
Still just like Tic-tack-toe lost its luster when I discovered it was a forced draw, 2nd ed was ruined for me by a string of bad experiences with the pre-power gamers known as min maxers. Its sad that they now inhabit almost every corner of the rp world. The meta game of making characters who could out stat any difficulty but with no real sense of place in the fictional world soured me a bunch.
Not that it means anything, but time was that a DM who simply tried to kill the characters was frowned upon. It seems that players who try to build characters just to overcome scenarios are doing the same thing in reverse though its not nearly as stigmatized.
The current Ed of the games gives a nod to this adversarial type of play ceding non-combat abilities to the RP lovers (sure whatever you want as long as it doesnt effect combat) and allowing or even requiring a focus crunch-wise on conflict resolution abilities. The current ed is a reaction to the gaming environment and is a product of it.
The golden era of gaming for me was late first ed. Before the cartoon and the "uni" action figures. It was like your favorite band just before they were played every 64 min on the radio and the cool guy in homeroom "always liked them." For as much fun as 2nd was, it became the sickbed of the game until 3rd was released. 2nd ed seemed to announce the transition from D&D as the game to D&D the business product. Once that threshold was crossed it could never go back.
I think in the echo chamber of modern gamers we all long for the nostalgia and the "wow thats cool" of earlier editions but we are inherently more sophisticated players than we were then. As experienced players of a wide variety of games and game systems we would be hard pressed to look at the 2nd ed rules and not think them dated, subject to abuse and in need of streamlining and/or modification in some way. (Criticals, fumbles and encumbrance fans to one side of the room spell component, psionics and dual class humans to the other.)
The beauty of 2nd ed was not in the rules, it was in the players imagination, in the gaming environment, it was the time we had with friends confronting impossible and fantastic foes.
So much of D&D's worth is dependent not only on the quality of the DM and the setting but on the quality of you fellow gamers in the group. After all is said and done my current group (sorry for the break guys things will settle down soon I hope) might have provided some of the greatest game moments I can recall. Given that, I have to put the edition we are using as one of the best facilitators for D&D ever....even if folks consider it a marketing tool to grab video-gamers. I think we all know our way around a joystick these days.
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