Why AD&D 2e?

Is that 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.

My mindset

 

I suppose it should be little surprise that someone raised in the offal of 4e would gravitate to the other ‘bad’ version of the game. 2e is generally viewed as the corporate version of AD&D, the one without Gary Gygax, made to cut the old man out of the story, remove the stuff that angered the fundies, and shore up dwindling book sales. I did investigate 1e AD&D, OD&D, B/X, and their various retroclones. The internet made no qualms about their superiority, and they have a great argument there. For what these earlier editions do, they’re brilliant. They create a foundation upon which a very particular gameplay loop can be structured, with the dungeon as its crown jewel. The challenge was, I wasn’t looking to send my players into caverns deep and dark; I wanted a system that would blend the old-school, dungeon-delving rulesets of those editions with the modern focus on character-centric, story-based roleplaying. I also wanted better formatting. I was in luck, as they released that game in 1989.

And in 1995 with worse art! And in 2013 with a fancy cover!

 

 

2nd Edition AD&D is something of a beautiful hodgepodge. It’s designers were extremely knowledgeable about what had come before and loved it. Its lead and technically only credited designer, Zeb Cook, literally wrote the X in B/X. They were also given a mandate by their corporate overlords to keep the thing compatible with 1e, so in essence it is the ‘same game’ with the same spirit, and as a result it carries over many of the frustrating idiosyncrasies which later editions would expunge and OSR successors would smooth out.

Yet, it’s also modern in many of its assumptions. By 1989, the module-as-a-story concept was established, while the multi-level dungeons and deadly funhouses of earlier works were no longer the main point. This edition’s focus on completion of the adventure and good roleplay to earn XP, its ability-check-by-another-name skill system, and its completely modular design were built for the types of adventures that TSR wanted to produce, where hard-bitten mercs could rob the temple or intrepid heroes could save the kingdom within the same ruleset.

If you’re reading this and are well versed in the OSR community, you may be shaking your head, making tsk tsk and tut tut noises, and saying “If you wanted that you should have just picked up [insert OSR product]!” Yes, I’m positive that something like Dungeon Crawl Classics or OSE would have scratched the itch without all the pain of learning this crumbling and forgotten fossil. But then I couldn’t have run the original Planescape material straight from the books, and that was a major selling point. Also, I found that I really like descending AC, and if you can point me to an OSR game that retains it without matrices, I’ll thank you.