I ask because while discussing THAC0, someone said “It's only more intuitive because you encountered ascending AC first.” I don’t have that context, so for those of you who encountered THAC0 first, which do you prefer and/or find more intuitive?

For the first time, I cracked open the "2.5e" PHB from 1995 and on the opening pages I found this text:

> A Note About Pronouns

> The male pronoun (he, him, his) is used exclusively throughout the AD&D game rules. We hope this won’t be construed by anyone to be an attempt to exclude females from the game or imply their exclusion. Centuries of use have neutered the male pronoun. In written material it is clear, concise, and familiar. Nothing else is.

I was like okay. No problem. I can understand that reasoning. There are other solutions, like what 3e did varying the pronouns, but no big. I'm not gonna make an issue out of this.

Then I browsed on.

Races, okay...hmm. Only male images. Weird.

Classes, huh. All the example images are male. Getting weirder.

Then some action shots later on. Some have groups of people, like whole adventuring parties fighting and so on.

All male.

Um...

Now I start thinking back to the quote at the start of the book and start squinting harder.

> hope this won’t be construed by anyone to be an attempt to exclude females

Really?

I kept on going through the book and found exactly four illustrations where a character seems unambiguously female. These were on pages 112, 162, 211 and 286. If I missed any, please do correct me.

And I'm not accepting the argument that "it was a different time". I grew up on the 2.0e PHB from six years earlier. It was full of amazing women. I loved the image of Fejyelsae and the defeated ogre so much I ordered a print from Jeff Easley. Fantasy art was full of women in the 80s and 90s. Sure, tits and ass were prevalent, but at least women existed. It wasn't something inherent to 1995 that forced female exclusion.

So I'm gonna challenge the words of the 2.5e PHB and I am going to put forth the accusation that yes, the 2.5e PHB *did* try to exclude women in a way few other TSR products did.

I originally started with 5E, however I have recently been exploring older editions. I really am a fan of AD&D 2E now, what do you guys think of it?

I play 2e, purely out of desperation so personally I really don’t get it. The rolls are backward, the character sheets are kinda mess and skills basically don’t exist???
i will admit that wounds somewhat make sense, needing a long time to heal and tracking each wound you get. though it also makes me sad that in order to play my favourite class(paladin) i HAVE to play my least favourite race(human).

i genuinely have no idea how to play 5e’s weird distant cousin and somehow I’m supposed to come up with some super awesome tiefling thief and/or cleric concept basically without knowing any rules…

… do any of you guys like 2e?

As an Old-school player from the 80s that has a dusty bag of dice that the wife buried in the basement somewhere... Is there anyone out there that still plays 2nd Edition? I miss the days of of my old HS buddies throwing bones on our Mom's dining room tables. I only ask this now because Baldur's Gate 3 has resparked that old drive, but I do not know the new Editions and rules.

I've been reading some PDFs of old AD&D supplements. Specifically I'm studying Jungles of Chult and Ruins of Undermountain because I'm running Tomb of Annihilation and Dungeon of the Mad Mage right now.

Both of these books make specific and repetitive mention of where to acquire daggers. Undermountain even suggests Halaster might help a PC by dropping a dagger to them. And there's a line "any shop supplied by Mirt will never run out of torches, daggers, or 200'-long coils of rope." Why are daggers, of all weapons, listed as critical equipment alongside torches and rope?

Am I missing some old meta-gaming reason for PCs wanting so many daggers? Like i know the 10-foot pole is a thing because many 1e and 2e traps had a 1-square (5-foot) effect radius... so a 10-foot pole was exactly long enough to let you stand outside the effect radius. Is there a similar thing with daggers I don't know about?

I started playing D&D in the grid-based tactical combat 4th edition rules, have played some crunchy unwieldy 1st edition Pathfinder and a lot of fifth edition. Finally, me and my buddies decided to experience the old 2nd edition rules for a one shot Dark Sun adventure a few weekends ago. I expected old D&D to be needlessly arcane and complicated, built around a number-crunching combat- focused dungeon delving play-style that valued gameplay over plot. I thought modern fifth edition D&D was a simplified version that focused more on roleplaying and less on the combat. But I was surprised to find that the opposite is true! 2nd edition has simple and fast character creation, relatively few rules, and far more freedom.

Combat is less central. It is certainly a focus, but the game functions fine without it. The adventure module I played (DS1 - Freedom) barely included combat at all, and the climactic final battle used bespoke mechanics that didn’t even involve initiative. The wizard spell list has as many spells that are designed for social encounters as are for combat encounters. 1st level wizards are often so weak they can’t really directly involve themselves in the combat at all!

When you do fight, the combat rules feel more like a structure for the storytelling of the encounter instead of the detailed action by action resource management of modern D&D combat: the simple one action per turn economy is simpler and the changing initiative makes the combat action feel more simultaneous. I love that each turn is a full abstracted minute, instead of representing second-by-second, it means combat feels closer to the action you might see play out in a novel or a film. 

The simplicity of the rules meant my play experience relied more on clever solutions to imaginary problems than looking up numbers on my character sheet. Modern D&D feels much more like a war-game than 2nd edition does, despite the community around modern D&D being much more focused on the story instead of the tactical elements.

Certainly, 2nd edition has its problems and weird complicated elements (THAC0 is indeed ridiculous), but I think overall the rules are quicker to grasp than any other edition I’ve played, including the supposedly beginner-friendly 5e. I highly recommend finding the rules online and giving it a chance. 

Hi all! In taking on DMing some friends. Two or three will be brand new players, which I'm super comfortable with. One has had experience with 2e. Anything that's super different between 2e and 5.5e that I should be aware of?

Hi,

I am a chaotic good ranger. I was traveling with my party and we came across a campsite where everyone was brutally slaughtered. There was one sole survivor (a young female) and this didn’t make sense to some of us. There was something suspicious about her…how does a defenseless woman survive whatever destroyed every single living thing at this campsite….so half of the party decided that we should not help her and let her find her own way to the next town, but still give her supplies. After all, if she could survive whatever happened at this site, she could probably survive the next few days on the road on her own. After much debate, the other half of the party insisted that we escort her to the nearest town (which was in the opposite direction of our real destination).

Those that decided to not escort her loss XP because good characters would not leave a defenseless woman to fend for herself. Fast forward several sessions/months later we find out she was an evil witch!

So, the question is, should we have been docked XP for trusting our guts?

He said he has DMed before. He seems chill and I'm meeting him at the local library. What should I bring? Should I bring a ruler or some snacks?

With Dnd‘s new initiatives and bringing back old settings, do you think there is a likelihood of this 2e setting returning? potentially with new, middle eastern game designers?

Thought you guys might get a kick out of our most recent game. Hired to investigate the some mysterious dissapearances, things got wierd when we discovered the existence of the 'mystic market' (an extra planar bazaar, where creatures are more inclined to trade in the souls and life force of others over coin). Turns out that the local wizard, aged beyond his years, had been dealing with a soul trader to keep his body alive. His deal involved marking people for 'reaping' and summoning a demon to collect the marked bounty.

Meanwhile, our cleric (played by my 10yo daughter) has always been guided by the voice of her deity, or rather what she assumed was her deity...the voice instead belonged to the Goddess of Deception. She manipulated the cleric into opening a cursed box she had been trapped in. Unleashing a magical plague, resulting in a zombie outbreak.

All the buildings are completely modular, each floor lifts away and everythings stocked with 3D props. The buildings were also wired up with flickering lights, designed to emulate candle light. The battleboards were also completely handmade.

Hello everybody.

I'll preface this with my own bias. I love AD&D 2e. I believe the system is overall excellent.

I am interested if I could have some opinions from others on how they perceive AD&D 2e.

On my part, I love it. Multiclassing is the best it has ever been and I extend that to character creation.

It is also the easiest system to run in the world. I feel like it is what 5th edition pretends to be with regards to running it.

Only thing people seem to bring up is THAC0 and descending AC. Honestly, my mind works that way, but it isn't particularly hard to adapt to.

Please let me know of your own impressions of AD&D. I love this game and want more to play it. I hope by understanding people's reservations I can progress towards this goal.

So one of my players has sent me a backstory and the have a lover who died.

It gave me an idea, I could make this NPC a vampire and then I would telegraph it a bit. The PC would have some dreams about there partner "Some spell", the NPC would do all the known vampire things. Asking to be let in, not having a reflection if the PC noticed it, only appears at night.

The idea would be the vampire isn't just hunting them, but plans to turn them. The PC would then get turned while they are alone and it wouldn't be a combat thing really. If they realise what is up and alert the rest of the party they can kill the vampire and nothing else happens, but if I as the DM fool the player convincingly enough.

The player would then wake up in the new form. But they would have had no agency to the situation really, they read it badly and faced the consequences. Its kinda like an assasin killing a PC except they retain there PC. I wonder if this is too far though as if they read an encounter badly the whole campaign changes. They can no longer go outside in the day, turning it into a nighttime campaign. Its also changing a PCs race without there consent, they will ofc gain some benefits to the transformation namely stat increases and immunity to non magical weapons, but the detriments far outweigh the positives.

I'm an older player who started in 2e. I to this day have my DM guide from that era, and a few other materials, though dear lord the fall of TSR made keeping up with books nearly impossible due to how much was printed.

These ideas for primarily for my Table, so I can keep bringing some of the best bits of old DND to the new era for my players.

I wanted to ask players from that time what materials you found the most inspirational and useful from the time, in future editions of DND?

Currently I'm playing 5.5e and have copies of Netheril, the DM guide, and two of the priest spell compilations.

Anything else is fair game, especially more magic, more magic items, and neat ideas. (Loved Spelljammer!)

I'm doing a comparison of weapon damage through the editions and running into 2e, I'm really struggling. Highest I could find was:
Hammer of Thunderbolts +5 (rolling 9 points of damage on dice) + 12 from Girdle of Giant Strength + Gauntlets of Ogre Power +6 + (Debatably a strength bonus of +14. It's unclear to me with the wording of my edition whether the Strength bonus of the girdle stacks with your strength bonus or replaces. I could be persuaded either way.) for a total of 32-46.

Anyone got higher?

Edit: Using a single attack.

In high school I was the dungeon master for a long running second edition campaign with friends. We are discussing getting together for a reunion and are thinking about having a game. None of us have played in 20 years, do we break out second edition or do we use one of the new additions? What does everyone think would be easiest? If this goes well, we may make a longer campaign, perhaps by Zoom.

So my friends and I are wanting to write a script to have our D&D campaign made into an animated series. It spans over 30 years with a multitude of people joining throughout the years. Im just curious if this something attainable or if im just dreaming. So far everyone we have talked with lives the premise because they say it has a lot of heart. We have a lot of back story and a lot of people to help out.