It's time. A detailed and opinionated appraisal of the best, or possible second best, version of Dungeons & Dragons ever made. I mean of course Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition. There are many things to love about the Classic D&D line (B/X, BECMI, Cyclopedia). Its streamlined, narrow and intuitive numbers. Its focused presentation. The way it knows, better than any other version of D&D, what it wants to be and then just executes that vision. Its superb chassis that makes it as good for running as-is, as it does for extensive houseruling. It is thus perhaps a tad ironic that many of the things there are to love about Advanced  Dungeons & Dragons are diametrically opposed to the reasons for loving Classic D&D. Extolling the virtues of Classic D&D often end up as an implicit critique of AD&D. And many of the reasons for playing AD&D are a stark rejection of the virtues of Classic D&D. Nonetheless, I want to be understood here. When I

I'll tell you what I instinctively disliked the first time I opened the 3e Player's Handbook:  Priest spell levels going all the way up to 9th level.  Now, the reasons for this change seem fairly obvious to my mind. It streamlines spell progression for priests and wizards and makes it easier to gauge power level of a priest vs wizard spell.  But are those actually good  reasons? Is streamlining in and of itself a positive? Perhaps being able to gauge power level is useful, but tangentially so if so. How often do you need to compare a priest spell to a wizard spell and determine how powerful they are compared to each other?  As for streamlining spell progression between wizards and priests - This may seem useful as it makes progression transparently equal (getting rid of different XP tables was another move to ensure everybody progressed at the same pace. An alleged virtue I would question the virtue of), but it belies a point that is central to the argument of this blog post: H

This is part 1 of 2 about 2nd edition. Part 1 will focus on the rules aspects. Part 2 on the nebulous 'culture' aspect of 2e. Out there in real life, I just about made the cut for an elder millennial. But in terms of DnD generations, I am very much Gen X - The Forgotten Generation.  Sandwiched in between the cantankerous curmudgeons of the B/X and AD&D 1e old schoolers who from their loftily perched blogs, abrasively champion their refined and sophisticated simple gaming ways and dour-weird piss-bag adventure aesthetics (all hail Erol Otus!) and the guileless charoppers of 3e that revelled in posting "build guides" on message boards for prestige classes and tricked out feat chains, considered Wayne Reynolds real cool and thought planning out their Conjurer 3/Incantatrix 10/Fatespinner 4 15 levels in advance to be a fine act of character development Is the un-championed generation X of 2nd edition romantic railroaders and the sad fools who learned their naive D&

It seemed revolutionary at the time. 3e came out and made a unified mechanic. Roll 1d20 against a target number to see if you succeed. In combat, AC is the target number. For everything else, it's a Difficulty Class [DC]. That's it.  Some of those DCs are calculated as a function of level, opposing ability score etc. But what we also got from this system was a way of ad hoc determining the difficulty of something and then simply saying "roll against that target number to succeed".  In its core form, this is wonderfully simple and intuitive. All you need to internalise is the size of the numbers on a d20 in relation to overall difficulty and then you can resolve basically anything with it. The part about size of numbers has proven to be a bit of an achilles heel for d20 over the years, but that is a different point I will address further below. No, the real point here is that there's an unintended side effect to DCs as a unified mechanic. There are other downsides

This is going to be one of them rants I fear.  It relates to my previous meditation on the heft of levels across various editions  and my recent contemplation on ability checks in B/X , specifically my desire have the unmodified numbers mean something in and of themselves, rather than something purely to derive other numbers from that do  have mechanical relevance. In a way, this posts is like a concluding remark on the heft of levels in TSR vs WotC D&D. To summarise, if the mechanical relevance of ability scores are almost always somewhere on a scale of -3/+5, why do we bother with rolling 3-18 instead of just using the derived numbers to begin with? Why has that never changed? And why do I have a firm impression that there'd be a great outcry if it were ever changed in a future edition? And it occurred to me that ability scores do have a relevance in the unmodified form, one that has remained across all editions - They are the formative narrative components of the character s