I've heard people claim 2e is the best D&D ever was.

Nostalgia
Also, fuck 3.5

>>49376988

Nah. B/X is the best D&D ever was. Everyone knows that.

It's very easy to get into at the front end of things.

2E was good primarily because of the atmosphere it promoted. It was still not socially acceptable to hyper-optimize and pretend you were an armchair game designer just yet. It wasn't the game's rules or mechanics, It was the game's social push to tell the "that guys" of the day to go fuck themselves.

2e was the heyday of quirky campaign settings, namely, Dark Sun, Planescape, and Spelljammer. And others that started in 1e like Dragonlance and FR were still getting a plethora, if not the majority, of their content published during 2e's reign.

I don't know if I'd say 2e was the best, but it was probably when D&D was it's most prolific without being utter shit. OD&D/Basic is a much more streamlined ruleset, 1e had more heart, was grittier, and still had strong mechanical ties to Basic. 3e and 4e were both massive clusterfucks, and everyone knows for 5e they're just publishing the minimum viable product to keep the game in the public's eye while they try to make money off of licensing.

>>49378030
samefag here, also it had the best settings
points of light is shit tier

>>49378059
As a place you actually adventure in PoL is a fuckload better than Forgotten Realms or some shit.

To quote, Points of Light is the setting where "you have an enormous vertical weight in time that is bearing down upon a fragile present". That's gold for dungeoneering: but Points of Light was stuck with an edition totally contrary to that.

Like go dial up however many OSR dungeons and see how easily they fit into the PoL design philosophy.

>>49376988
Clusterfuck, yes, but it's actually well balanced.

>>49376988

2E had a very different framework than 3E. I'm not talking about balance issues directly, let me start with an anecdotal observation before I get into the meat of it:

Back when I was playing 2E, for a very short time when I first got into roleplaying, it was almost unthinkable that the players knew the rules or the system better than the DM. The DM, mechanically, was pretty much always the best player, in almost every group. He had the best grasp of tactics, of what all the spells and monsters did,of this weapon works well against that armor, etc. Around the time 3E came out, the situation reversed itself. The stereotype for most gaming groups was clever players and a beleaguered DM, who couldn't keep up with his players tricks and traps and mechanical expertise.

3E tried to expand the market, and did so hugely, which is one of the reasons it's still influential today, despite 2 editions, 16 years, and a massive subset of the DnD crowd that thinks it's rank garbage. And one of the reasons it was so successful is that it streamlined and simplified things, which allowed it to expand the DM pool enormously. 2E didn't have any of that, the rules were scattered all over the fucking place, were often written confusingly. It was expected that only the top top tier of the people involved in DnD would become DMs, whereas 3E democratized things. But because of that, fewer things were spelled out, and the DM had enormously more discretion; 3E, with its pleb as DM assumption, generally opted to spell everything out the devs could think of, remove all ambiguities. It's no real surprise that Rule 0 started to get a dirty meaning around 3E's heyday.


So the very tldr is that 2E did a lot of winnowing, and generally, only people who were dedicated, studious, and intelligent could have a chance at being a 2E GM. And ultimately, having a good GM in a bad system is preferable to a bad GM in a good system about 9 times out of 10.

>>49378030
What sort of atmosphere do you think 2E promoted?

>>49378703
>>>49378030

I think it promoted an atmosphere of "just play the damn game" and the idea that the rules were there as guildelines mostly, because of how bolt-on almost every subsystem was. Almost everything was optional.

While there wasn't a lot of specific world implied the fluff, the flavor of early 2E, at least, was one of a more traditionally heroic fantasy. It was less gritty than 1E for sure. It felt excited about itself and didn't read entirely like a textbook.

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>>49378030

>It was still not socially acceptable to hyper-optimize

Tell that to all the dart-fighters and everyone who took broken Complete Book of Elves, Forgotten Realms, and Legends & Lore kits.

Especially the priest kits.

And then we have Skills & Powers...

>>49376988
The game relied on the gm far more than the rules to keep things moving. This meant you didn't have rampant minmaxing munchkins optimizing and calling "Muh philosophy!" because the gm would be expected to tell you "No."

California it a power trip if you want but everyone knew the gm... DM was the final authority and if you were an asshole, you'd know it... and if the gm was an asshole, he'd have no players so it worked for everyone.

>>49378968
>the dart-fighters

That's more like an urban legend than anything else. It requires your GM to allow specific sets of optional rules without question, and even then is only narrowly useful as a mage-killer build.
That's unless you go full Skills & Powers with it, but S&P was released at the very tail end of 2e, and is so widely and variously broken in so many ridiculous ways that nobody sane ever uses it.

The brokenness of Book of Elves is overhyped by the internet as well.

>>49379474
>It requires your GM to allow specific sets of optional rules without question

Fighters are dogshit without specialization.

>>49379631

Yeah, but specialization alone won't make dart fighters all that much better than regular fighters. If you have exceptional strength and certain rare magic items, and the even rarer magic darts, yeah, you'll be a monster briefly, for the first round or two until the enemies close with you and all that dart specialization has to go out the window in favor of melee for the rest of the fight.
I've played a dart fighter before, it was fun but very far removed from anything that could be called game breaking, or even overpowered, really. It looks good on paper, but it fails to deliver at the table.

>>49380004
Go get that Throwing proficiency from S&P to really break darts.

>>49380307

>implying any DM will let you use the crazy horseshit in Skills and Powers

They ought to have just labelled that book "Player's Option: Ridiculously Broken, Poorly Written Garbage"
Or maybe "Unearthed Arcana 2: Munchkin Boogaloo"

>>49378968
What anime is this? It looks kind of cool.

>>49380688
Judging by his name declaration at the end there with a google, i'm going to guess "Rokka no Yuusha"

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Is there any better melee weapon against Small or Medium targets than the 2d6 damage, speed factor 4 katana wielded two-handed?

>Player's Option, Combat & Tactics, page 144:
>The samurai's katana may be the single finest sword ever made. It is a slashing weapon with a sharp, chisel-shaped point. The steel was often of exceptional quality, built up with a laborious process of folding and re-folding; some blades had hundreds of folds. This created a sword of tremendous resilience and strength. The hilt accomodates [sic] one or two hands equally well.

Or, if you DM allows Dragon Magazine #232, the 2d4+3 damage, speed factor 4 Manchu broadsword wielded ONE-handed? Does any melee weapon really beat that against Small or Medium?

>>49380688
Nah uts garbage.

>>49377955
I've heard that acronym but don't know what it means. Big Xmas? Boobs over something xtra?

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>>49381290

B/X is the Moldvay(Basic)/Cook(Expert) release of Basic D&D, which ran parallel to AD&D 1e & 2e. See the handy chart.

>>49381352
What's the X for?

>>49381479

The X is for e(X)pert. Because you can pronounce BECMI, but not BXCMI.

>>49381541

Wait, that was supposed to be a joke, but now it doesn't make sense. Drunk posting is hard, man.

Anyway, Cook expert is referred to with an X for... reasons.

>>49381572
>for reasons
probably because X's are so cool, man, like, goddamn.

>>49376988
2e was unabashedly unafraid to try anything.
It didn't care if subsequent books had kits that sucked, power wise, compared to previous books.
It emphasized character role over roll.
It wasn't trying to be Final Fantasy like 3ed was or WoW like 4th.
It actually streamlined the previous version instead of chunking it, good and bad.

>>49383841
Of course, most of those ended up playing directly into its downfall...

I like the way multi (and even dual) classing is handled, the different XP tables for different classes, and the level restrictions for sub-humans.

Wizards are arguably even more powerful, but they are also more frail and at lower levels die to a breeze.

>>49379474
>the very tail end of 2e
1995 is not the tail end of 2e.

>>49384462

In what way? It didn't try and pander to proto weeb shit that wasn't in any way main stream when the product lines were being produced? That killed it?

>>49387036
>It didn't try and pander to proto weeb shit

>2d6 damage speed factor 4 katanas

>The samurai's katana may be the single finest sword ever made. It is a slashing weapon with a sharp, chisel-shaped point. The steel was often of exceptional quality, built up with a laborious process of folding and re-folding; some blades had hundreds of folds. This created a sword of tremendous resilience and strength. The hilt accomodates [sic] one or two hands equally well.

>I've heard people claim 2e is the best D&D ever was. Why?

It's what they got started on and grew up with.

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>>49378968
dart specialization and complete book of bards.
2nd ed down fault was the bloat of additional books catering to min/maxers and "that guy".

BUT

it was my entry D&D, and is forever loved.
it made the classes feel fully seperate from other classes due to the levelling process.

2e was the edition that officially abandoned XP for gold. This is both a good thing and a bad thing.

It's bad because it formally ushered in a new era of incentivizing ill-defined story-goals over adventuring. This led directly to 3rd edition making things clearly defined again… by giving XP for winning combats. (Whenever anyone bitches that you can't call 3e, 4e, or 5e "like a video game", all you need to do is point at this rule. You get XP for killing stuff; you're playing a fucking video game. It just has shitty graphics.)

OTOH, it's good because it helps us understand. All of the major changes made from 1e to 2e were things that Zeb Cook said (rightly) were "the way you're already playing the game". And it's true. By 1988, AD&D was already thoroughly corrupted by the munchkin generation (it probably had been so since about 1984–5) and was no longer an RPG about adventurers seeking loot.

It helps us to be aware of the fact that by the time Unearthed Arcana hit the shelves around '85 or so, the whole AD&D line and all of its descendants were already lost and perhaps beyond redemption.

It demonstrates that the Diaglo mantra is in fact true: "OD&D is the one true game. All the other editions are just pale imitations of the real thing."

>>49384623
I guess a better way to say it is the end of TSR.

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2E didn't require as thorough of an understanding of the rules as 3E, both for playing and DMing.

The main strength of 2E (as people have said) is that you could just pick and choose whichever rules you liked, and the game mostly ran on track.

Pic probably related

>>49378968
>dart-fighter
>hyper-op

I feel like I missed so much. Casters seemed like where it was it if you wanted to be super good.

>>49379474
To be fair, ALL of the bullshit that gets talked about on these boards, all the optimization crap in the various games, is basically urban legend-tier. GMs worth a goddamn will tell you to sit down and shut up so that the actual fucking game can be played. I think that any game leans in that direction by default; it just seems like 2E did it more because it existed before the internet, so the overclockers didn't congregate and create the illusion that they were important.

>>49389246

Honestly, most progression in a tabletop RPG has been done in some video game.

Heck the Soulsborne games have money as XP.