Tuesday, June 7, 2011

What I (Re)discovered When Looking at 1E and 2E AD&D

Just a quick note about my lack of recall regarding 1E and 2E AD&D and how I was shocked to relearn something about those two editions: I was flipping through PDFs of the 1E and 2E Player's Handbooks last night. I was looking at character classes and races. And I was shocked that I had forgotten that 1E is pretty restrictive when it comes to what classes the demihuman races can take. It's not much different from what was in OD&D, as far as I am concerned. Then I looked at the 2E PHB and saw it was much less restrictive.

During my return to gaming over the last couple years, I was under the impression that 1E and 2E were very similar when it came to allowed race/class combinations. My memory was obviously flawed! Despite my disdain for 2E (which is probably due mostly to the unsavory characters I was gaming with during my 2E era), I think I would much rather play that edition that 1E due to the difference in race/class restrictions. In its own way, 2E is closer to my current game of choice, Castles & Crusades, than 1E.

I feel pretty sheepish at the moment. Ah, what a journey of rediscovery I am on!

5 comments:

  1. 2e's unforgivable sin, though, was dropping 1/2 orcs. :)

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  2. You know, I had that exact same experience just last night! Was flipping through my old 2e player's handbook and discovered, to my shock, that dwarves have a 20% chance of having a magic item (excluding weapons and armor and certain class-specific items) malfunction every time they try to use it! Made me wonder how many groups actually used that rule!

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  3. Google keeps eating my post. Since my gaming group and I were already playing 1E, we tended to only add 2E stuff as it came out if we thought it would add more to the game.

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  4. I was so into 2e in my younger days...we always ignored the racial level limits. However, more and more nowadays I see some value in them.

    Eric

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  5. I remember when the 1E Unearthed Arcana book opened up a bunch more classes for demi-humans and how cool I thought that was, and as I remember, 2E pretty much continued that tradition (although, if memory serves, 2E was even morerestrictive than UA but of course less restrictive than original 1E).

    One thing I always thought was weird in 1E was how NPC demi-humans were allowed to take levels in some classes, like dwarves taking levels in Cleric, or halflings taking levels in Druid, but as a PC, you "weren't allowed" to do that. We played "by the book" so we kept those restrictions intact, but I always thought it was kind of silly.

    That's one thing that I feel 3.x D&D got right - any race can be any class.

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