I never moved on. The game is about the players and the ref. Something Gary knew and said. The rules don’t need to cover everything and should leave plenty up to each ref.
The few 2nd & 3rd editions games I played in felt more like computer gaming then Role Playing. Not the fault of the newer versions, but the refs seemed to have gotten too distracted by the rules.
Whereas I moved on as soon as I could. The lack of customizing of characters in AD&D really annoyed me–things like the idea that elves could not become priests, dwarves couldn’t be thieves, etc. struck me as very silly. Level limits for nonhumans irritated me. The incredibly clunky rules for figuring out whether you hit (turn to one page in the DMG, not the PHB, and look at a page of super-small-printed numbers to cross-reference your roll and the enemy’s AC) were awful. Saving throws followed no rational system: you had to memorize or look up the roll. And on and on.
True, there are clunky aspects to 3E, but in general I find that the rules support the imaginative storytelling instead of getting in the way of the imaginative storytelling. In AD&D, it seemed to me that the more rules you ignored, the better off you were (to a point, of course). It no longer seems that way.
Daniel
Well, AD&D1 felt like NetHack to me. And I love NetHack. So YMMV.
Actually, the two examples you listed are wrong. There were three classes in 2nd edition that every race could be, and they were fighter, thief, and cleric. 
But yeah, some of the other ones didn’t make sense. Elves couldn’t be bards? Despite the many, many references in other AD&D books to the great “Elven bards” singing songs and telling tales? I can’t remember if Elves could be druids or not, but if they couldn’t, they should have been able to.
And a page in the DMG to see if you hit? Huh? You take you’re THAC0 (printed in a table in the PHB,) subtract the target’s AC (so yes, you add to it if it’s a negative AC,) and then you need to roll that number or higher on a D20. What I find amusing is that with the new system of BAB and all postive ACs, a natural 20 is still an auto hit (for most encounters/DMs,) and a natural 1 a miss, even though the goal now is to roll lower than the target number.
I really don’t see what was so confusing about THAC0 myself. I figured it out when I was six.
But yeah, saving throws were random numbers, but I always wrote them on my character sheet when I leveled so I didn’t have to open up the book.
That’s all fair. I use AD&D 1 Ed but with so many changes that it is probably only half the rules. Especially with the races. That is also a result of using it since they were published. The only later than 1st printing I had are the Monster Manual and extra duplicate copies of the core books. After nearly 30 years, I should have many changes.
I also explained that it was the ref’s fault and not the books fault. I just don’t think a good ref needed the newer rules. A good ref could ref a terrible game like Traveler or maybe even Gamma World. 
AD&D was plenty good enough to work with. The 3rd edition movement rules bordered on insane, at least with the ref’s that took it too literal and turned the game back into a Chainmail[sup]TM[/SUP] hex board game*.
Jim
The nerds are really coming out for this guy. Here are some more tributes:
I wrote my whole post, and only just now saw that you’re talking about “2nd edition.” I tend to think of AD&D as 1st Edition, and that’s what I was talking about earlier.
THACO is a Second edition innovation. The 1E DMG had four tables on a single page, with AC as rows and level as columns. You found your class, found the enemy’s AC, and cross-referenced your level to figure out what roll a successful hit would require.
The goal in 3E is to roll higher than the target number, always. (Well, not exactly always: when you’re rolling percentages, a low roll means the percentage goes off. But then, percentages are most often rolled for miss chances, which means you want to roll high so you DON’T miss). That’s another one of the nice innovations with 3E: in earlier editions, sometimes you were wanting a low roll, and sometimes you were wanting a high roll.
Sure. The problem was figuring out what to do when, for example, you were targeted by a wand of disintegration. Save vs. rod/staff/spell? Save vs. death/disintegration? Save vs. wand? Each of them could be supported. The current rules aren’t always perfect (I never can remember what sort of save glitterdust requires), but they are much less ambiguous.
Daniel
Yeah, and don’t get me wrong–I’m not any sort of edition groupie. I prefer 3rd edition, but certainly don’t think it’s because of the game’s objective superiority. It just works better for me.
Daniel
On THAC0: We were using the expression before 2nd Edition ever came out, but that’s not the point. These were easy to work out for a fighter (20 at 1st level, improved by 2 every odd-numbered level, or optionally by 1 every level), not so easy for anyone else. IIRC clerics (and druids and monks) improved every 3rd level, thieves (and assassins) every fourth, magic-users (and illusionists) every fifth, but not always by a consistent amount, and monsters had a table all of their own which made monsters with 1 + 1 hit dice a holy terror compared to monsters with 1 - 1. So you needed the tables just to find out the THAC0 - it wasn’t as easy as saying “if you know the THAC0 you don’t need the tables”.
A further complication was this: the 20 was repeated on the combat table. That is, if you could hit AC(x+1) on a 19 and AC x on a 20, that meant “a net 20 counting all bonuses”, which for a mid-range character could mean +2 or +3 for weapon, +1 or more for Strength, and a few more for spell effects - say a rolled 14 or better. But to hit AC(x-1) thru AC(x-5) you needed a rolled 20; for still lower (more negative) ACs you needed a natural 20 plus some bonuses.
I well remember one fight we got into where my Ranger Lord with a fully powered-up Hammer of Thunderbolts needed natural 20s to hit the principal villain, while the dwarf fighter who was a level or two higher needed about an 11, thanks to this peculiarity. Unbalance much?
Saving throws, as stated, had hardly any rhyme or reason whatever.
Next up… unbalanced character classes.
And here is User Friendly’s tribute
That’s due to the difference between a bard sitting in a tavern (or the Elven equivalent) singing songs of yore and a bard out on adventures. As I discussed with a DM many years ago, when they said their system started a character at 1 XP: “The trick is getting that first experience point.”
Most people aren’t adventurers. They’ve either never had the call or were too smart to take up the profession.
That doesn’t seem to address the important question: Why should it be that human bards often end up on adventures while elven bards do not?
-FrL-
You know, considering User Friendly’s subject matter, you would think they would make the website a little more Lynx-friendly. Doesn’t look like there’s any way to just download the damn strip.
He makes some money off published comics. He is not only a web comic. Also his books have actually had decent sales. The downloads would probably be considered counter to actually making money.
As to Lynx friendly, I could be wrong, but I don’t think that is one of the Unix based software programs he has talked about over the years. Maybe he just doesn’t like it.
From the Colbert Report a few days ago:
Colbert has said in interviews that D&D was his gateway into acting. For my part, I’ve got nothing to add here, other than to say I avoided D&D-type games as a kid for fear that it’d make me too geeky - which was self-conscious ridiculousness; I was a geek anyway - and in the years since then I’ve often thought that was a very silly mistake.
Gygax made a game important enough to get people to debate its influence on literature & society.
Yeah. Pretty good.
Hey, in 1st Ed AD&D the fact that Raise Dead doesn’t work on elves (or half-orcs) should be reason enough. Obviously a necessary play-balancer to make up for the fact that otherwise the demi-humans would be far too powerful.
Demihuman level limits were a silly idea too. At lower levels the limit is an irrelevance, at higher levels it’s excessive. As long as your first-level elf has enhanced dexterity, senses, language skill and combat bonuses, he’s a big jump ahead of his human counterpart; but when everyone else is fifteenth level and the elf is stuck as a seventh-level fighter, can’t hit anything for toffee any more and is way behind on hit points and saves, it’s long past time he retired. (Similarly, the first time the party gets bounced by a bad-tempered dragon and both the human and the elf get toasted, but only one of them is coming back after the party hies them to a temple or their 9th-level cleric gets busy, bye-bye balance.)
“But without the level limits, everyone will want to play demi-humans!” spake the great panjandrum. Incorrect. Without some compensating weaknesses, maybe so; but it doesn’t therefore follow that the level limits were the right compensating weakness.
A Dragon article came closer to addressing the question of balance generally (not addressing demi-humans) and 2nd Ed adopted a variation of it with a section on design-your-own character classes: Start with a generic experience table, with a multiplier that starts at x1. For every ability you want to have, increment the multiplier. So if you want d12s for hit points, the ability to wear plate armour, use big nasty weapons, cast spells as both magic-user and cleric, turn undead, cure by laying on of hands, elf combat bonuses and dwarven resistance to magic and poison, you’re good to go. Of course you won’t hit second level until you have about nine thousand experience points, but that’s your look-out, and if this is unacceptable, perhaps you could compromise on some of those key features you wanted.
I need to rank about the Monk shortly, but I’ll build up a head of steam first.
Oh…1st edition. Before my time.
Actually, I think I started on the Red Box D&D (NOT AD&D) Basic set. It was me, my brother, and two friends of ours (also brothers.) We eventually got the Black Box Expert set, and the Blue Book (only one book, not two)…I think that was the Intermediate?
We did get to AD&D, but yeah, by that time it was 2nd edition (the PHB cover with the fighter on the horse, aww yeah.) I remember what a big jump it was going from Elf/Dwarf/Halfling as a class AND race, to just a race and then also picking a class.
And I think they finally got the hang of balancing races in 3rd edition. Racial limits and class restrictions were dumb, and no one I knew even played the level limits (but we did do class restrictions.) But balancing out the human by giving extra skill points and a feat was a good compromise, since it evens them out at the start, since at later levels the racial bonuses don’t mean much.
For what it is worth, the compromise I made and several others I played with back in the day, was that when a character hit it’s book max, the character then needed double the experience to advance. We also always allowed Elven Bards. They just started as F/TH multi-class instead.
I took it a step further in my games and made a Ranger/Bards option instead, eliminating the thieving altogether. Stressing the lore and legend part of being a bard and restricted to longer lived races like Dunedain & Elves.
Jim
New York Times Op-Ed from Sunday on Gygax by one of the editors at Wired.