1st Edition and 2nd Edition AD&D gamers UNITE! ;-)

[Luthais]

Originally Posted by Zhul

It's hard to quantify really... the fluff is your basic high fantasy fare. The crunch is dry to read and some of it doesn't sound that great when you read about it.

But playing the game... is just fun.

Maybe it's because I have a good DM (that certainly helps a lot). Maybe it's because the 3.5 game I'm in is an exercise in frustration (that certainly doesn't help me enjoy 3.5e). The thing is, from level one I felt like my character was useful and contributing to the whole party - instead of firing off my one spell for the day and cowering in a corner, praying that nobody noticed me.

We've been playing the 4e game for several months now and our characters are 5th level. However, even since the beginning, the game has played like 2e did in the "sweet spot" from 5th-12th level. All classes have cool powers (so the fighter won't be hating life as the mage overshadows everyone at 20th level as in previous editions) and using those powers together as a team make you really feel heroic.

This is, of course, my opinion. Everyone has their own preferences and tastes.

That sounds more like you have a good DM that knows how to take advantage of the game system... When I lived back in California, I had a DM who was good enough to make 3.5 fun, but all of my other experiences with 3 and up have been painful.

I've always enjoyed 2nd edition myself, anything from just the pure basics to all the handbooks and options books, and everything in between. Myself and a few of my friends have moved on to make video games for a living, so needless to say we were always coming up with custom systems. But I still like the core 2nd edition best.

Speaking of which... anyone know of a good place to pull together a group? I live in Huntsville, AL now and the only groups I have found are 4th edition.

[Dathkar]

Like a lot of others here, I pine for the days of 2nd Edition, but on the other hand there are some things I like about 3rd Edition that I really enjoy reading about. Note that I have played exactly five game sessions of 4th Ed, and not actually played 3rd Ed at all although I have the core books and several of the Scarred Lands books.

Despite this, I've been tinkering with a campaign that incorporates much of what I found best of 2nd Edition with some aspects of 3rd and even 4th because it fits in with the concept behind the setting. I'm constructing it with a focus on open-ended epic gaming potential, so the entire world is built around "power centers" drawn from the 3rd Edition epic book. I'm also drawing from an old, pre-M:TG WotC resource that discussed deific powers and attaining apotheosis if the players decide to pursue that. I'm incorporating a lot of the political conspiracies and paranoia that I find in the original World of Darkness from White Wolf, emanating from the power centers. There's elements of Call of Cthulu as well. And I'm powering it all with largely 2nd edition mechanics because that's what I'm familiar with and for that truly epic feel I wanted to incorporate Spelljammer. I am taking a few ideas from 4th Ed to balance some things out that have always bugged me a little about 2nd. I've been working on this for a couple years now, and five notebooks worth won't fit on a forum post.

One of the biggest issues for me was the imbalancing nature of the wizard, first as a walking Sleep spell, then as a plot hammer and later as omnipotence itself. I've talked with local gamers who told me how 3rd Edition further imbalanced spellcasters at higher levels. I didn't like the resolution of that in 4th Ed-- I don't say it isn't fun, but it's a different type of fun than 2nd, I've found. But I took some ideas from there and 3rd Edition to give everyone enough of a buff to keep everything fun without providing a disproportionate level of power to the party or to certain classes-- the Wizard is much more focused on specific types of magic as he progresses even beyond how Specialist Mages are presented-- they have to focus on specific types of magical effects and recieve penalties to using others and every spell has to be accompanied by a skill check that is modified by various things in the environment (it sounds complicated but in practice it's gone very smoothly); everyone gets automatic access to specific prestige classes based on culture that allows a greater range of utility powers, and Wizards get access to basic magical effects that can be used on a regular basis in combat but quickly become outmoded as he gains in power.

Oddly enough for someone who just finished a graduate program in geography, I have no real maps yet of any of this, just a few rough sketches for figuring out adjacency tables for the various cultural groups.