AD&D 2nd Edition Premium Excerpts

Wizards of the Coast has some sample pages from the Player's Handbook up over here to look at. It should could as no surprise that the Premium books are internally going to be reproductions of the 1995 second prints with the black border covers and the revamped color interiors. The druid excerpt provides a sampling of the artwork from that edition. It's generally regarded as inferior to the 1st printing books (I agree) but it's not bad....just not as good, unfortunately.

I imagine it was a lot easier to reprint these books, as I am sure the art and layout assets were sitting around in a WotC vault somewhere, and who knows what the print-ready condition of the original 1st prints look like these days.

Either way I am looking forward to these reprints. At $50 apiece I may have to cave and order through Amazon rather than my FLGS (much as I want to support my FLGS these premium edition reprints are just too pricey to shell out full price for), but this is the edition of AD&D that I spent the most time with and found the most enjoyment with. As I've said before, my entire gaming career in the nineties was defined by AD&D 2nd edition pretty much (followed by a handful of other games like Cyberpunk 2020 and GURPS), so for me these are must-haves.

The AD&D 2nd Edition Premium Covers

So the AD&D 2E reprints will have these covers. Very nice, I like this look a lot and it makes better use of the famously atrocious art in the revised editions (still not as good as using the pics from the original first printing covers, but a nice leatherette green covering it all up is still a better way to go!

AD&D the First Part One: Bards, Psionics and Armor Adjustments

Welcome to the first article on my observations and musings on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, spurred by my acquisition of the recent Premium editions, giving me the first real chance in years to read through these books again with the jaded eyes of an old gamer veteran, a far different experience I can safely say from what my childhood self experienced with these rules! It's sort of like being able to see out of only one eye and then suddenly one day you wake up and the other eye works, opening you up to the amazing world of depth perception.

I'm not going to be charitable and gushy toward the rules....I'm going to be straight forward about it. I feel a lot of people for reasons unknown to me have sort of enshrined Gary Gygax and his writings in a way that almost makes him like some sort of hobby saint. It's creepy, to be honest. But I think he did a tremendous amount of good for what he started, and while his actual rule set might be a strange and sometimes uncomfortable ride, it was all we had back in the day and I'm frankly impressed that the game even managed to come into existence in the first place.

I'm not bothering with Original D&D, because I don't own it anymore (I wish I did, for collectability alone), the version I do is Swords & Wizardry Complete, and I actually like S&W a lot chiefly because it manages to strain from the messy coagulant that was 0E something resembling a cool rules lite system that is eminently playable. Not that the working parts weren't there in the first place--obviously they were--but as a youth I found it easier to read B/X D&D in conjunction with AD&D to figure out how to play than I did trying to puzzle through the OD&D rules which I had bought after the fact (them being cheap at a local used bookshop in 1981ish). I wonder if they're still on the family ranch somewhere, with my old Arduin stuff, Thieve's Guild books, Dragon Tree Press publications, Judges Guild, and All the World's Monsters? I know I had it all at one point...and not a damn thing seems to have made it to 2012 in my possession. Sigh.

So first up, while reading through the Players Handbook I ran across lots of oddball bits that I find curious in light of today's gaming evolution. I'll try to contrast what I noticed today by what I remember from my attitude toward the same 30+ years ago. To begin...

Weapon Proficiencies and the Lack of Skills

This is old hat, nothing big, although I don't remember using them until later on (when I got more rules-savvy), chiefly because there was confusion in my youth about the weapon lists attached to classes and this other thing. So were fighters not actually proficient with all their weapons? Were they just proficient with weapons trained in? As a kid it was easier to ignore.

Today, with AD&D 2nd long dead and sorta buried, I know that the rules were intending for classes to show weapons permitted and proficiencies to be the rules for which of those weapons one was skilled in. Even today the list seems fairly limited; I liked how 2E introduced weapon groups to fix the issue....and of course 3E's feat system for proficiency.

It still surprises me that we didn't see non-weapon proficiencies until the Wilderness and Dungeon Survival Guides. The secondary skills chart in the DMG was the only nod to skills in AD&D with the core books. I know today that there's this thought in the OSR movement that skills are bad, for various reasons (discouraging puzzle-solving on the player's own merits, or confusing the process of player/DM negotiation, or not accounting properly for the broad ideal of what a class might know, and so forth) but back then as now the value of skills as features that could define a character who was above and beyond the scope of the player seemed like a good idea to me. I remember using various skill hacks for AD&D, T&T and other games after I discovered Runequest and later Dragonquest.

I think...when you're a kid, you're a lot closer to the era of "cowboys and indians" so the idea that you need something to help arbitrate when someone claims knowledge for a character that might not otherwise obviously have such comes up. "I'm a wizard, I study alchemy." Sure, prove it. Plus, if you apply the "new old school" approach that says that skills are crutches to real player interaction...well, I do wonder sometimes just how those games work these days. Maybe I'm too out of touch with the old guard to remember, but I know as a kid I often wanted to play characters that knew things I as a player never could. It was part of the charm of role playing. I think the same still can be said today. But...well, there's more about this later, when I discuss the DMG and some of Gary's philosophy on how the game plays and what the game is.



Weapon Adjustments by AC

I love this chart now, and if I get a chance to run 1st edition I plan to do so RAW with all rules turned on, including weapon adjustments by armor class, because it seems so ridiculously specific and appropriate. Now, that is! Back then I thought this chart was a pain in the ass and designed specifically to screw people up. I know why, too. The chart is using AC as defined by specific armor types....but if you wrote down armor with your DEX adjustment factored in, or with magical modifiers, then technically it would muck up the chart, right? And that meant a lot of look-up/book-keeping/adjustment for what averaged at most to be a 5-10% payout. It was easier to decide it was all a wash and move on.

I did the same with Speed Factors back then, although I used their revised version religiously in 2nd edition. I'd use speed factors now, RAW, except for one problem: they're basically tie-breakers in combat....he who has the smaller, quicker weapon hits first. This is ironic, because Runequest does it the opposite way, with bigger weapons getting the extra reach necessary to pull off an attack when the opponent with shorter reach closes. Ironically Runequest was allegedly based on some rough eyeballed empirical data gathered from SCA events, so presumably they noticed that having a bigger reach provided a consistent advantage. Not sure if it's all a matter of interpretation (i.e. AD&D based the rule on similar but differently interpreted data from mock fights) or if AD&D's rules were more of a "wargamer armchair resolution" rule. I suspect the latter.

The Bard

Ah, the first prestige class well before its time. I don't object to the bard, except for the fact that the requisites leave many questions vague. So you need to have 5 levels of fighter...easy enough. Then you take a level in thief. Are you taking thief because you're destiny is bard, thus you are choosing an arbitrary range of class levels? Are you really dual-classing? How does a half-elf qualify, since he can't dual-class? Does that mean a multi-classed half elf can qualify?

Back then I was so confused about the bard I simply never used it....which was easy since no one would likely ever qualify anyway, even if you assumed the laxest interpretation on the requisites. Today, I think the bard is best looked at as being a class that simply dictates it's first 5 or so levels are fighter, and then at least 1 but no more than 3 levels are thief, after which you gain the first level in bard. So long as you meet the bard requirements, its not the same (not entirely) as dual-classing. And half-elves can do this because it says so.

I'd allow this bard into a 1E game today, but I gotta admit, the bard (especially after the Complete Bard book) in 2nd edition was a fantastic revision, a dramatic improvement in play and accessibility over its 1E version.



Psionics

Back in the day psionics were just a weird rare option that was interesting but for which the chance of seeing in play was snivellingly tiny. It really served as a warning marker, to be honest; if you met a guy who had a portfolio of characters, of which 80% had psionics, then you knew he was a munchkin and a cheat, plain and simple. I didn't ever see actual psionics in play until 2nd edition....and those of us who played a lot of 2E may remember the mixed feelings and many issues about the revised psionics rules. My favorite iteration is what came later in Skills & Powers, which benefited from hindsight.

But you know what I am amazed about today is how while writing the Players Handbook neither Gary nor anyone else thought it would be interesting to turn the psionic rules into a viable class option. It would have been trivial to do so, and I am thinking about writing up what that class would look like now. Makes me wonder if anyone ever tried that, or if an option for such ever saw print (such as in Dragon). My Dragon collection was full of holes, so its always possible, I imagine.

(EDIT: After a bit of creative searching I found it: the psionicist appears in Dragon #78)

Okay, enough for today....more next time! Including the Straw Balrog Premise and the curious nature of what is worth XP and what is considered fun. Also, the reason insanity charts show up in every Palladium game, possibly revealed?

"The Dangers of a Mutable System..." and other thoughts inspired by AD&D

"The Dangers of a Mutable System..." A telling quote from Gygax himself in the intro to the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide....the premise being, its possible to move too far in one direction, altering the game to suit to taste, only to find that the direction traveled was perhaps not ideal, and the game has been altered too much to sustain itself, leading to a short and possibly unpleasant campaign. If you look at later editions as being "official" extensions of this philosophy that 1st edition held, that each table was its own mutation of the system, then one can imagine why not all later versions sat well or lasted long!

So yes, I have the Premium AD&D books in my hands FINALLY AND AT LONG LAST!!!! 'Bout Damn Time! I thank Mandi at Active Imagination for being able to get me copies, and I thank my awesome gamer wife Jody for letting me get them (because she'd like to play some more 1st edition, y'see) although I did bribe her with a copy of Guild Wars 2, so yes, much money was spent today on entertainment of a most foul and suspect nature (the best kind, of course).

I played AD&D mainly from 1980-1984 or thereabouts, with some on and off stints after that, until about 1987 when I had more or less moved away from AD&D and was playing other games entirely (chiefly T&T, Palladium Fantasy, Runequest 2nd edition, GURPS 1st and Dragonquest). This lasted until 1989 when I was off to college and my first gaming group (most of whom I have since reconnected with through Facebook) after a campaign of Dragonquest talked me into checking out the new AD&D 2nd edition books. I had all but abandoned by AD&D 1st edition collection by then...it was something I associated with my younger gaming years at that point, basically, and so I dared to pick up the new AD&D 2E books and sure enough, that was what helped me to recapture the magic.

I didn't play AD&D 1st edition again until 2007 when my local group in Albuquerque went through a repurposing phase, and a new member (Jason) joined who was not only a diehard AD&D 1st edition grognard, but he hadn't even been involved in the hobby outside of that edition since the mid-80's. The rest of the group was like me: we were playing 3rd edition because it was current, but we all had fond memories of really getting into 2nd edition, or of it "bringing us back." So it was with the addition of Jason that we decided to abandon 3rd and went to a hybrid of 1st and 2nd edition....I sort of used a mashup of the various books, most of which I had to secure from Ebay once more (you see, I had a vast collection of books, once, but a fairly staggering amount of gambling debt from my second marriage--my ex had some issues--led me to sell most of it on ebay. Ah, the irony.)

That went on until 4E came out, which that particular group tried for a heroic tier campaign, and after deciding 4E was not going to work for them we cast about, trying some more AD&D, then C&C, and at last settling on Pathfinder when we gained some new players who were keen to try the latest edition of the ever-evolving D20 system.

So now I'm in a new zone once more. I'm keen to try more C&C and have managed some games recently, but Pathfinder dominates the crowd. However, with the premium AD&D books there's a newly emerging interest in the original AD&D system, and not just among those who have played it before. Myself, I am finding that there is a lot of meat in those books that I arbitrarily tended to dismiss back in my turbulent teens due to the fickle nature of youth; the AD&D DMG was like a bible to me from roughly age 10 to 14, and I remained enamoured with it even afterward, despite the fact that from roughly 1984 to 1990 I published a bi-monthly fanzine aimed at T&T and other non D&D RPGs, with a crowd of readers and contributors who were all very much on the "not D&D" side of the gaming fence. I wrote a lot for these other games, ran other games, and generally had fun....but I would usually go back to the AD&D books and ponder their arcane complexity and obscure minutiae with private interest, occasionally running games for them but never feeling I could indulge thanks to the peers I ran with. That's why it wasn't until I went to college that the floodgates opened and 2nd edition was able to blast its way in....by 1989, everyone I knew wanted to play AD&D, and not Dragonquest or Runequest (well, some did). So I managed to get weekly sessions of AD&D 2E in throughout college. Good times.

One of my Favorite Modules. The province of Eor'nin, Hyrkania in the Middle Kingdoms of Lingusia is where I placed this module (thus the city of Eor).

Anyway, it's a lot of fun revisiting these books, more than I expected it would be. I remember going on a picnic in the Chiricahua Mountains with my family in 1985 or thereabouts, with my AD&D books tucked along, so while everyone else was barbequeing and picnicking I was at the fold-out table rolling up random dungeons to put my adventurers through (it was sometimes hard to get regular games in the Ass End of Nowhere, Cochise County, Arizona). I remember running a crazy dungeon with Yeenoghu as the top villain for my sister and a mutual friend who I think in retrospect might have been a bit freaked out by our shared sibling intensity at playing the game. I even remember going to cons circa 1986-1988, and talking the DM into letting me play my vicious warlord princess Lakuna Helbyrn, a halberd-wielding fighter who was professionally neutral evil.

It might just be the nostalgic buzz and the general satisfaction of reading the books again, but hopefully not. I think I'm going to construct and run a new campaign, probably centered in my Warlords of Lingusia setting, since that was the game world that sprang forth from my introduction to the hobby in 1980 and which has evolved continuously for thelast 32+ years now. I've already ordered the Fiend Folio from someone on ebay (because back then the FF was the fourth most iconic and important book to all my old campaigns, and is the reason grell and hooked horrors factor into any and all editions I have ever run). I'm also snagging a copy (hopefully not falling apart) of Arcana Unearthed, because by the time it was released back then I was not running AD&D, and so missed its integration into play. I recall reading it and questioning the value of the book overall, although I think ironically AU contained within it the seed of virtually all that was to come in D&D's future development.

I actually think the Fiend Folio has more iconics than the Monster Manual, at least for me...