Kariotis
Explorer
I see myself returning to AD&D 2 from time to time for purely nostalgic reasons. Being my first contact with D&D, to me it feels the most like what D&D "is". But I also recognize that this is completely arbitrary and that every generation has their own D&D, or even multiple D&Ds. It's different for everybody, really.
So steering away from pure nostalgia (or that we just still have the books lying around), what are things AD&D 2 offers that later editions lost or that got diluted? I'm putting this in the general forum instead of the old editions forum because it's mainly about what we can learn from that edition for more recent play, for game design, retroclones and the like. Also, I'm mainly thinking about game mechanics, but of course the lore is not completely separable from that.
So steering away from pure nostalgia (or that we just still have the books lying around), what are things AD&D 2 offers that later editions lost or that got diluted? I'm putting this in the general forum instead of the old editions forum because it's mainly about what we can learn from that edition for more recent play, for game design, retroclones and the like. Also, I'm mainly thinking about game mechanics, but of course the lore is not completely separable from that.