I'm one of about six people in the world who rather enjoyed AD&D 2e. Despite its many flaws, I far prefer it to the dross of 3e. I"ve started creating a game based on what I wish 3e had been. I refer to it as D&D 2.5, or Orcs & Ogres. You can take a look at the start of this at http://excaliburvideoproductions.com/Orcs%20%26%20Ogres%20draft%201.pdf.

I'd like to hear anything you have to say.

It actually looks interesting. All the old-school D&D artwork brought me back to the early days of playing RPG's. I'd like to look at it in more detail when I get a chance.

Zachary_Wolf wrote:
It actually looks interesting. All the old-school D&D artwork brought me back to the early days of playing RPG's. I'd like to look at it in more detail when I get a chance.

I like your draft, it's easy on the eyes and to the point. I happen to think that reworking D&D, of which I have some experience myself as well, is mostly a matter of personal aesthetics - many of the things you do in the draft could be done in different and just as good ways, but the designer himself will often have a clear preference on how to do things, which formulations make the most sense and so on. Thus I won't go into detailed wrazzling of how cross-class skills "should" work or stuff like that - you have a strong mechanical vision that conforms to your own preferences, and that is as it should be.

The basic ideas are good and there is plenty of stuff that I've established in my own D&D reworking as well. It's interesting that you've decided to use skills - personally I'm more than happy to drop them from the system as useless, on the principle that character class already defines what a character is supposed to know. I guess that skills allow more granular individuality for individual characters, although personally I prefer to achieve that by expanding on the feat system. Clearly this has much to do with the fact that I interpret D&D in a much more challenge-based manner than this draft does, though - skill definition helps in detailing characters, while feats are better for introducing mechanical subsystems, which is definitely not your goal here.

It seems to me that you have a good handle on the features of 2nd edition AD&D that make it unique among D&D editions. Your version seems well-suited to classically balanced, setting-intricate adventure gaming with medium-level mechanical points of contact and no hardcore rules optimization. I would have no particular objection to using your version of the system to run a traditional adventure campaign with a focus on character acting, in-character dialogue and experiencing fantasy adventure - a particular kind of simulationism, if I'm allowed to use GNS terminology. Certainly your system is much more suited to this type of adventure campaign than the later D&D editions, so in that regard this seems successful. I also much prefer your cleaned-up and streamlined mechanical approach compared to the original second edition AD&D, so that is good as well.

I'd be interested in seeing more about the experience and training system, if you're not just using the original. Your own thoughts on dual- and multiclassing, as well as class balance, would be appreciated - I count at least five different methods traditionally used to balance characters in D&D, which doesn't count the variants where you're not supposed to balance them, so I'm interested in what your thinking is on that regard. If you'd like to tell us more about the kind of adventure gaming you yourself do with this system, that might help us understand it better. I'm also interested in your design goals in a more abstract sense, mostly from the viewpoint of suggesting connections or references that might prove helpful.

I like it, except for the the stat generation method.

It just seems wrong to have to pick a class and race before rolling the dice. It would really suck to decide to be a fighter, but roll 13 on strength, and have great stats for a thief.

Every bit of my D&D brain screams "Roll six stats, arrange to suit, then pick a race and class". !

Or even have point buy - you could give races more or less points depening on how good their race abilities are.

There's another guy on the web that published an "AD&D 3E" that was a development of 1e, then there's stuff like OSRIC that uses the SRD to create an old school ruleset without breaching copyright.

If you intend to publish this, you may wish to contact the OSRIC developers for some advice on the copyright (they made a book much like 1e, but just different enough to not breach copyright).

NN wrote:
I like it, except for the the stat generation method.

It just seems wrong to have to pick a class and race before rolling the dice. It would really suck to decide to be a fighter, but roll 13 on strength, and have great stats for a thief.

NN wrote: Or even have point buy - you could give races more or less points depening on how good their race abilities are.

Eero wrote:
The basic ideas are good and there is plenty of stuff that I've established in my own D&D reworking as well. It's interesting that you've decided to use skills - personally I'm more than happy to drop them from the system as useless, on the principle that character class already defines what a character is supposed to know.

Eero wrote: I guess that skills allow more granular individuality for individual characters, although personally I prefer to achieve that by expanding on the feat system. Clearly this has much to do with the fact that I interpret D&D in a much more challenge-based manner than this draft does, though - skill definition helps in detailing characters, while feats are better for introducing mechanical subsystems, which is definitely not your goal here.

Eero wrote: It seems to me that you have a good handle on the features of 2nd edition AD&D that make it unique among D&D editions. Your version seems well-suited to classically balanced, setting-intricate adventure gaming with medium-level mechanical points of contact and no hardcore rules optimization. I would have no particular objection to using your version of the system to run a traditional adventure campaign with a focus on character acting, in-character dialogue and experiencing fantasy adventure - a particular kind of simulationism, if I'm allowed to use GNS terminology. Certainly your system is much more suited to this type of adventure campaign than the later D&D editions, so in that regard this seems successful. I also much prefer your cleaned-up and streamlined mechanical approach compared to the original second edition AD&D, so that is good as well.

Eero wrote: I'd be interested in seeing more about the experience and training system, if you're not just using the original.

Eero wrote: Your own thoughts on dual- and multiclassing, as well as class balance, would be appreciated - I count at least five different methods traditionally used to balance characters in D&D, which doesn't count the variants where you're not supposed to balance them, so I'm interested in what your thinking is on that regard.

Eero wrote: If you'd like to tell us more about the kind of adventure gaming you yourself do with this system, that might help us understand it better. I'm also interested in your design goals in a more abstract sense, mostly from the viewpoint of suggesting connections or references that might prove helpful.