Descending Armor Class

I hail from the era of the post-3e consensus, where it is a given that descending armor class is unintuitive and dumb, while ascending armor class is simple and pristine. The orthodoxy on this is rather ubiquitous. I’ve been hard pressed to find any modern TTRPG that embraces the concept, and even the OSR gang tends to toss the idea overboard when designing their fantasy heartbreakers.

Planescape: Setting and System

Planescape is, by far, the most interesting fantasy world I’ve ever stumbled across. The later editions of D&D offered only the barest glimpse of this setting, with descriptions of Sigil, the City of Doors, the otherworldly Outer Planes, and the city’s enigmatic ruler The Lady of Pain.

When I finally dug deep enough into the historical strata to hit the rich vein of the mid-90s, I found a treasure trove of lore within the Planescape campaign books and accessories. TSR had invested much into their creation, detailing everything from apothecaries to crime kingpins, all wrapped in a bizarre shell of an impossible dystopian magicpunk setting. It had a feel and tone that I had only seen in novels like Perdido Street Station and Neverwhere, with a clash of cockney slang, philosophical war, and easy death. To sweeten the pot, a great deal of that lore and tone was injected into the only video game based on the setting: Planescape: Torment.

Why AD&D 2e?

Is that a zero in the word "OPP0NENT?" 

In short, I wanted to run Planescape. That’s a stupid reason to learn and run a 35 year old TTRPG from a defunct publisher, but it was the inciting incident. That initial interest in 2e was spurred on by growing dissatisfaction with WotC over the past few years, the underwhelming 5e version of Planescape, and seeing what the OSR community had to offer. The road toward cracking open the 2nd Edition AD&D core books had been laid.

Some context: I missed all of AD&D and 3rd Edition. TTRPGs weren’t in my wheelhouse during those years, and aside from having used those systems in the CRPGs from the era, they were opaque to me. I started in 2008 with 4th Edition, mostly due to the excellent podcasts WotC was putting out with the Penny-Arcade crew (they’re still online and worth a listen). Saying that you started out in this hobby with 4e is a bit like telling someone that you got into Star Wars by watching the Holiday Special, but it is what it is. We ran that edition happily for four years until going all in on the D&D Next playtest material, then lived in 5e for a solid decade. That’s all to say, I don’t have the old-school chops of the venerable grognards; I came to AD&D with a very different mindset.

The 2e Primer

If you’re here to just grab the file, it’s here.

If you’d like to understand why I made the thing, keep reading.

While this edition is better organized than the earlier games, it’s still a mess. Sometimes rules get tables, sometimes rules are buried in paragraphs, and some rules were forgotten completely, only to surface years later in an accessory book, or else are spread over multiple chapters and never reference one another.

Learning this system can be exhausting, as you can never be sure what you missed or if you’re even playing correctly. That’s not unique to this edition, even 5e has its moments of ‘oh look at this rule they tucked away,’ but in 2e it’s ever present. I was learning the system in order to teach it to a group of players whose experience with D&D goes back no further than 3.5, and I knew I would be their only lifeline to understanding its mercurial nature.

I searched the internet for a good quick guide, an overview, a cheat sheet, anything that could give me a roadmap, but there really wasn’t much out there. So I did what I usually do when learning any overly complicated and occasionally contradictory collection of information: I took notes.

Those notes eventually coalesced into a guide, and within a couple months of writing and play, I had something I found useful. I thought others might, too. I downloaded Scribus edited the thing into something readable, and now it’s The 2e Primer. If you see errors or places where improvement can be made, please share them. I’d like for this document to be the tool I couldn’t find when I was searching for help; anything you can offer toward that end would be appreciated.