Play Report: AD&D 2e Session 0

Last night, I started what I hope will be a new weekly game of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition. After my three-year D&D 5th edition game wrapped up, I wavered between running another 5e game for a new group of players or running a 2e game with the existing group (which is what they wanted to try next). 

2e is nostalgic to me. I started playing in elementary school (though we probably didn't actually start using the rules correctly until I was in high school). Whenever I considered running it again, I was put-off by the idea of refamiliarizing myself with all the rules and adapting my style of prep to a very different system - one without the many handy online tools a DM can utilize when running a more modern version of the game. It wasn't burnout - I just couldn't get going again.

Ultimately, starting this blog encouraged me to get a game started, largely because I feel that if one is writing about D&D, they should also be playing D&D, and if they're playing it, they should write about it. Most of the topics I've written about so far were motivated and informed by my play experiences, so to some extent I view play as fuel for the blogging fire. By the end of my last campaign, I found myself regretting not recording play summaries, so the blog will serve that purpose for this game. I hope to post a brief play report every Wednesday, the day after we play.

Recording session notes is helpful for a Dungeon Master to internalize what occurred during play, and may be of cursory interest to the outside observer. What is more valuable is recording the process: How am I prepping? Why did I make this ruling? What problems came up during the most recent session? This sort of writing is of far more utility to the reader who isn't involved in the game - it's about sharing the experience and the methods, not just the stories.

Jenx over at Gorgon Bones has a series of posts about TTRPG hobby best practices which inspired this approach to writing play reports. I hope to keep these reports brief and will only go into detail about the process when it isn't too time-consuming. When it requires further elaboration, I'll most likely author a proper post about the topic inspired by the play experience.

I wanted to return to what I feel is an often unfairly-maligned version of D&D - more so even than 4th edition, probably, which has plenty of champions in this day and age. 2e is viewed as not being "old school" enough by OSR types, but it's also not something that "new school" (post-3rd edition) D&D players are longing to return to any time soon. It's the forgotten child of the old/new school divide.

I'm running, for the most part, barebones 2e - Player's Handbook only. No Skills and Powers or Complete X's Handbook or any of that. If I'm going to run this game for the first time in ten years, I'm not dealing with splat books and player's options and the like. I'll be using some optional rules, but certainly not all (for example, I don't plan to use Weapon vs Armor Type to-hit modifiers, and wasn't planning on using speed factor and other initiative modifiers, though my players seem to want to, so we may compromise on that). I'm aiming for the early 2e that has more in common with 1st edition, rather than the proto-3e that came later.

The setting is a generic, bucolic, temperate fantasy land sandbox - my 5e game took place in an apocalyptic science fantasy wasteland, so I wanted to do something very "classic D&D" this time. There are isolated villages, little groupings of towns, and a city nestled along the region's river systems. There's a big forest, a big mountain range, a big desert, a big swamp, and a big lake, with ruins and hidden monster lairs scattered about. (I'm in favor of cramming all the different terrain types into a region, logic be damned, because it's a game and it's fun for the players to choose whether they're going to adventure in the desert or swamp this week.) 

A cropped version of the regional map showing off the diversity of biomes - it doesn't have to make sense! Also behold the generic fantasy land of it all.

I have five quest hooks to get the party going at 1st-level and plan to have several more built by the time they get to 2nd. I know vaguely what everything is, and will add detail as those locations become relevant.

I previously wrote about character creation. In that post I said that "It behooves any Dungeon Master to write out their character creation rules for their players", and I detailed what my rules usually are for 5e. I adapted these rules for 2e and shared this document with my players, then sat down for a session 0/character generation session.

Overall, it went smoothly, though it did take about two and a half hours. Choosing nonweapon proficiencies - which we are using, mostly because I think it's funny that you can be proficient in dancing - and buying equipment easily takes the most time in 2e. I'm fond of the way 5e offers basic starting equipment for each class, and am wondering about writing up something similar for 2e. 

We're playing online using Roll20 and Discord, and I quite like Roll20's Advanced 2nd Edition character sheet by Seth and Peter B. It's...comprehensive, but you can ignore the stuff that you're not using, and it's (mostly) filled with handy macros that do a lot of the tedious stuff for you (it lacks macros in certain areas where they would definitely be useful). It seems that the character sheet is still a work in progress, and new features are occasionally being added, which I appreciate.

This character sheet is a little intense.

My players ended up making the following characters:

• Bernhardt Dalton: A Neutral Good human cleric (9 Str/10 Dex/14 Con/11 Int/16 Wis/6 Cha) who's more of a barber surgeon than a vampire hunter. Uses a mancatcher.
• Haymond Balor: A Lawful Good human fighter (14 Str/9 Dex/11 Con/10 Int/10 Wis/17 Cha) who specializes in the sling.
• Karven Stone: A Lawful Evil dwarf thief (14 Str/18 Dex/16 Con/13 Int/8 Wis/8 Cha) who's proficient in juggling.
• Rozidien Stoneskull: A Lawful Good human paladin (18[18] Str/13 Dex/15 Con/13 Int/14 Wis/17 Cha) who worships the god of the sun.

Technically paladins aren't supposed to associate with thieves or evil people, but it will be up to the thief to hide their treacherous ways from their companions and convince the paladin that they're walking a higher path now, or something. I'm not particularly interested in forcing the players to negotiate with each other over who can play what, or having one player's choice impose restrictions on another's - my hope is we can all be adults about it. 

Every player chose to roll their stats (versus using the optional point buy method), and one player even decided to assign his stats in order (the cleric's player). All but one player (the dwarf's player) rolled randomly for race, and I think they all rolled randomly for age. Tables definitely vary, but my players do get excited by at least some random element to chargen.

My character creation rules had the intended effect - somewhat. The player who usually plays a fighter is playing a fighter, and the player who usually plays a paladin is playing a paladin, but the players who usually play a barbarian and a wizard are instead playing a thief and cleric, respectively.

I'm satisfied with the party composition (if not a little disappointed that we didn't end up with a wizard instead of a paladin, so that we'd have the "Core 4") and am excited to see how they approach the world - and how long they last!