D&D 2E What does AD&D 2E do better than 5E?

[mach1.9pants]

Admittedly we never really got to high level, I had one go into early teens, the rest were all single digit. The xp the first level players got from gold quickly leveled them up, and I was generous with monsters targeting them etc. In addition the were often helped by their ex PC's magic items. My players enjoyed it as a bit of a escort role, and most went through the experience. It's just what it was, and we got on with it.

 

[James Gasik]

Admittedly we never really got to high level, I had one go into early teens, the rest were all single digit. The xp the first level players got from gold quickly leveled them up, and I was generous with monsters targeting them etc. In addition the were often helped by their ex PC's magic items. My players enjoyed it as a bit of a escort role, and most went through the experience. It's just what it was, and we got on with it.

Ah, xp from gold, that's what I was missing. That was an optional rule in 2e and one none of the DM's I played under wanted to use for whatever reason, so I never did either.*

In the unlikely event I get another chance to run 2e, I definitely want to give it a try.

*Strangely, no one I played with seemed to use it in 1e either, when it was the law of the land. Perhaps they just liked slower leveling?

 

[mach1.9pants]

Yeah we just basically carried across from 1e, only changing a few things, generally the classes. But then again we pretty much ran our combat like BECM because we'd come from that. Much simpler!

 

[soviet]

*Strangely, no one I played with seemed to use it in 1e either, when it was the law of the land. Perhaps they just liked slower leveling?

I started playing in 2e and the idea that GP = XP seemed utterly ludicrous - why would anyone play like that? How unrealistic!

Of course now I understand that it's a clever piece of focused design that communicates the desired mode of play very clearly. It's just that without an explanation to that effect it became rather lost in translation and thus abandoned, to be sort of rediscovered this century through understanding of more focused rpg design theory and online discourse.

 

[soviet]

The word no-one has used yet is nostalgia.

Nostalgia isn't a bad word. Nostalgia isn't a delusion. I don't say that 2e (or earlier) only has value because of nostalgia. 2e is absolutely my favourite edition and I agree with all the things people have said about the great art, the relative simplicity, the Complete Guide books, the play balance, the writing, the theatre of the mind, and so on. But I think there is also a sort of amateur hobbyist innocence to it whereas the WotC editions seem much more polished and even cynical. It evokes a time and place for me that adds an extra dimension to play even if it might not do so for someone who started later (or earlier).

 

[cbwjm]

I loved 2e, I loved the setting lore, I loved the ease of changing a class with kits (or with planescape, factions). The monstrous manual had so much detail of the creatures inside it, psionics was cool (they wouldn't be cool again until 4e, IMO).

I loved that ability scores, while important, wouldn't necessarily hold you back. If you were a fighter with 9 strength, you'd work just as well as a fighter with 15 strength, even most of the warriors that started with 18 strength probably didn't have more than a +1 to hit/+3 damage and with the lower hp in general of 2e, that's not that huge a difference.

I've noticed that something 5e has kept, is the boost at 5th level. This was when PCs started to feel powerful. 3rd level spells, warriors had plenty of hp and their thac0 was good enough that they probably had a decent chance to hit their targets, thieves were there...

About the only class that I don't think I'd use if I went back to 2e is the thief, I'd just change their skills to proficiencies and get rid of the class, or maybe keep it but they get a bunch of bonus skills. The % skills were kind of dumb in my opinion.

While I did like the various speciality priests back in the day, nowadays, I want a unified faith rather than a class for each god. I want to see a faerunian priest, a priest of the elven gods, and a dwarves rune crafter following the dwarves pantheon. But if you do want a lot of differentiation between priests, then 2e is the place for it.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Did you ever have to find ways to "fast track" new characters to get them up to levels where they were useful to the rest of the party, or did the xp they gained from hiding in the back and letting the higher level characters do all the heavy lifting balance things out?

I ran one game where a 1st level Thief joined a party of 5th-6th level characters back in 2e, and they were not only useless, they didn't last the session, so against all the advice of my fellow DM's, I let that player come in with a 4th level character instead, and in fact, I stopped starting players at level 1 entirely, since it made my life a lot easier as a DM, but I've always wondered how it played out for other groups.

I certainly recall doing so, although:

1. we also didn't always start at 1st level (either at campaign beginning or when bringing new characters in), and
2. we certainly didn't play by the rules in general (including likely some things related to risk and survivability).

Regardless, it should be doable, even relatively by-the-book (inasmuch as playing by the book is possible in general). If you can hide in the back with the mages*, and avoid area-effect abilities, you should be able to survive much of the time and be able to argue that you contributed. Since XP to level approximately doubles, a party that just reached level X before acquiring a new starting character would be able to get** them up to that level about when they started hitting level X+1 (inter-class levelling requirements notwithstanding). Mind you, you might waste some XP since you can only go one XP shy of 2 levels each session, and if your DM uses all the various optional XP methods which reward both individual contribution (levels of spells cast) and success (HD defeated), things will be slower
*even if you are a fighter, hope you pictured someone starting as an archer
**it would have been easier in oD&D where experience point gains were relative, so the 8th level Magic-User operating on the 5th dungeon level would be awarded 5/8 (63%) the actual experience, you would get 5/1 (5x).

 

[Mannahnin]

Yes, that's one virtue of the old (mostly) doubling XP charts. That it's relatively quick for new PCs to catch up to be roughly one level behind. Maybe not even that if one or more of the high level folks lose levels from being energy drained or something.

Maybe even less if you use the ruling on gold for xp that it's allocated the way the treasure is allocated, as explained in Mentzer Basic (and the way it's implied to work in 1E AD&D). So if the party wants they can deliberately give the newbies treasure in amounts that maximize their advancement speed.

 

[David Howery]

I've never played 5E, so a question.... how hard is it to make an NPC based on the PC classes? For example, in 1E/2E it was rather easy to make an NPC fighter of a certain level with certain equipment to face off against the PCs. From what I see of 5E though, character creation is a lot longer process, and NPCs seem to be in the MM with such titles as archmage and bandit....

 

[James Gasik]

I've never played 5E, so a question.... how hard is it to make an NPC based on the PC classes? For example, in 1E/2E it was rather easy to make an NPC fighter of a certain level with certain equipment to face off against the PCs. From what I see of 5E though, character creation is a lot longer process, and NPCs seem to be in the MM with such titles as archmage and bandit....

Yeah starting in 4e, WotC decided making monsters that use the same rules as PC's was a bad idea, so you really can't build a PC sheet and put it up against the players without there being some issues.

Monsters require tons more hit points to deal with players, and generally need upgraded damage. The Gladiator shows this in action; rather than build him as a Fighter, he has some "Fighter-like" abilities (even though a few of them, like Brute and Shield Bash are better than what the Fighter can do), but he's also a CR 5 with 15 Hit Dice (!).