Edit: ImageShack ate the original image. While perusing the Internets at work, as I am wont to do when I'm not forced to spend two hours looking for $45 worth of parts, I came across this thread on ENWorld. Basically, someone called out the notion that AD&D 2e was a "rules light" edition of the game and that most, if not all, players and DMs of that edition ignored whatever rules and subsystems that were (in)convenient. Honestly I can't fault their hypothesis, mostly because - in my case, at least - he's absolutely right.
It was around the time that someone pointed out that there's six different ways to punch someone in 2e that I kinda got nostalgic for the old girl. 2e was my first exposure to Dungeons and Dragons, and it allowed me to meet some of the best friends I've ever had my entire life. But, well, it's been almost 9 years since I've played and a lot has changed in the 2 1/2 editions so I began to wonder how I'd view my first love with the knowledge I've accumulated since then.
So, with a song in my heart and a PDF on my computer, I started reading the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook, 2nd Edition. And, lucky you, I've made some… observations as I've reacquainted myself with the game. Fortunately or not, my notes are pretty long, and they're probably snarkier than I truly intend, but hell with it, I'll be posting them in sections.
Attributes
- Exceptional Strength is weird. A warrior with an 18 Strength can roll percentile dice to add to their Strength score. Why do you do this? It's not explained, beyond that warriors are "entitled" to do so, and that exceptional Strength "improves the
character's chance to hit an enemy, increases the damage he causes with each hit," et cetera (but any improvement to Strength does this). Do the 0.5% of warriors who were lucky enough to roll an 18 on Strength need further differentiation between them? The difference between a regular 18 and 18/00 is +2 to hit and +4 to damage; in the world of 2e, where you only get bonuses from a 16 or higher, that's a huge difference. I have "fond" memories of my friends and I bringing freshly rolled fighters, paladins and rangers to the table who "just happened" to have rolled 18/90+ with 4d6 drop lowest. Steve was the most blatant about it, having a string of characters with 18/00 Strength. Uh-huh. Totally legit.
- Meanwhile, Strength is the only attribute to have exceptional scores: there's no 18/51 Dexterity, or 18/00 Intelligence. It's also joined by Wisdom and Charisma as the only attributes that you can't increase with racial adjustments (but all three can be decreased) by choosing races in the PHB.
- Also note that, while you can only have exceptional Strength by being a warrior, class selection occurs after you've rolled ability scores. Since you cannot be a warrior at the time you roll your ability scores, no character can have exceptional Strength at character creation.
- The Strength table has entries for specific feats of strength (for lack of a better phrase), namely the ability to Bend Bars/Lift Gates and Open Doors. Opening doors (and no, this only applies to stuck doors and not any door you may encounter) requires a d20 roll; BB/LG is a percentile roll. In both cases, lower results are better. Lord help you if you fail, because you can NEVER EVER EVEEER try again. You don't have a snowball's chance in Hell (>5%) of lifting a gate until you hit 14 STR, and the open door roll doesn't really become useful until you hit 18/91 when you can try to open barred or magically locked doors (but only on a 1, 2, or 3; players can't hope to get this roll beyond 6 or less). In the Attributes section, at least, there's no mention of what happens should more than one character try to perform these tasks at once. Hopefully that's somewhere else.
- Dexterity annoys me. It affects three things: your chance to avoid surprise, your ability to hit with ranged weapons, and you Armor Class. Like many other areas of 2e and before, positive numbers are better except when they're not; negative Defense Adjustment is better because. Also, if your DEX is 7-14, you may as well write "doesn't matter" next to the entry, as scores in this range have no effect on your character at all.
- Constitution is misleading in that the table header reads "Regeneration" at the end; without magical assistance (and even then I'm not sure) players can never have a regeneration beyond "Nil". Even if you pumped your CON to 20, you're still only regaining 1 hit point every 50 minutes. That might matter in the early levels, but by the time you've gotten your CON that high it's pretty much inevitable that someone else will have run across a ring of regeneration (which gives back as much HP as a 25 CON) and you'll have so many hit points that 1 HP an hour will not matter.
- Once again warriors get special consideration from having a high CON. A 15 or better CON gives additional hit points per die to a maximum of +2, or +7 if you're a warrior, and then only until 10th level (9th for warriors and priests because), at which point you start gaining fixed hit points like you should have been since 1st level. There are footnotes for CON scores over 20 that indicate low hit die rolls count as higher results (1s become 2s, 1s and 2s are 3s, up to 1s, 2s, and 3s being 4s). Seeing as how a 20 CON is monumentally difficult to achieve (and, by the time you do, you've forgotten what your HP rolls were and you've probably stopped rolling for HP anyway), and monsters don't have CON scores, I don't know why these footnotes are there beyond yet more false hope.
- The Intelligence table is the only attribute table to include a column for an optional rule (Maximum Number of Spells per Level). An INT of 19 or better can automatically pass their saving throws versus illusion spells of ever-increasing levels; coming back from a post 3e viewpoint, seeing this under Intelligence and not Wisdom (which the Perception skill(s) are based on in later editions) seems odd.
- If you want to be a competent priest-type (cleric, druid, etc., I think maybe ranger or paladin too), your Wisdom needs to be over 13. This is the point where you no longer have to roll to see if your spells fail outright. Oddly enough, this is also the point where you (i.e. a priest) start to earn bonus spells; you go from failing to cast 1 in 20 spells to knowing more spells than your average priest should in 1 point, without a transitional period.
- "The Charisma (Cha) score measures a character's persuasiveness, personal magnetism, and ability to lead." Your Charisma score gives you a penalty or bonus to your initial reaction with non-player characters. From the NPC reaction table I was able to find, when the PCs encounter an NPC (or group thereof) the DM rolls 2d10 and cross-references the result against the PCs attitude. Going by this mechanic, it is detrimental for the PCs to have a high Charisma; high Charisma adds to reaction rolls, and the table goes from (low to high) friendly to hostile. To reiterate, things are more likely to hate you because you're more likable.
Next time: Races!
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