2E (AD&D) Ruleset Questions/Issues/Requests
As if it hasn’t been said enough, thanks to Celestian for doing this project all these years and in helping making it an official product. AD&D/2E is the game many of us grew up with, and having a chance to play it again on FG is so very cool.
Niceties out of the way, I need a few clarifications/issues/fixes in need of addressing prior to running my first game. Like many of us that lived so very long in the roots of D&D there are many rules, variants, and other “home” rules I’ve been rattling around in my brain in a desperate effort to remember how we did things back in the day. To help with this prior to kicking off a new 1E/2E campaign I ran a test “Session Zero” to see what questions still needed answering regarding the use of this ruleset and how to run the game I want to run.
Below is a list of some of my questions/issues. My apologies if these issues have been brought up before, I just don’t have the time to pour through the thousands of FG forum posts and the SEARCH tool is not the greatest. Also sorry if I’m just not seeing the answer on someone these.
(I’m guessing one or more of them might be related to my first point, which is more of a technical issue that I’m missing somewhere in the code.)
AD&D vs 2E Ruleset Problem
Prior to Celestin getting 2E official, I began building my campaign in the old open AD&D ruleset. When 2E was announced and pushed to everyone I didn’t want to lose all my work so I changed the campaign.xml file to see the 2E ruleset over the AD&D one. However, something is still wrong. I cannot see certain modules and extensions and I can’t figure out why. I cannot see the EXT to turn off the Single Window, or the new NPC 2E Stat module.
Question: Can someone please post the “official” steps to convert your old AD&D rules to 2E? I want to be able to see anything created in both rulesets, include the OSRIC stuff.
1E/2E
Initiative
Initiative in 1E/2E is one of the things I really struggled with in coming back to classic D&D. There were SO many variations of initiative over the years between official and home rules, and for the life of me I could not remember how we did it most of the time (effects of growing old I’m sure). What I decided on was d6 + weapon speed, with creatures using natural weapons to have a weapon attack speed based on size (Size: T+0, S or M +3, L+6, H+9, G+12). I also wanted to have them roll said initiative every round instead of one for the entire combat.
Question: Is there a way to have the combat tracker auto-roll for initiative using weapon speed w/o having to manually key it into the initiative modifier window? Else if you’re having the party roll a new initiative every round you must stop at the top of the round and have everyone do it manually. Or, am I missing something?
Single Window View
I know some people like this feature. Unfortunately, I do not. Playing FG for over a decade w/o it makes you hate everything else, sorry. Can we make it an option in Settings rather than force it as the default?
Critical Hits
Using crits back in 1E/2E land was always a hot-button issue. The biggest complaint was that if a creature needed a natural 20 to hit you, and you could only crit on a natural 20, then every time said creature hit it would be a crit. In other words, a 1-1 hit die kobold going up against a knight in full plate needs a 20 all day to hit.
The quick-n-dirty rule we had was if you needed a nat 20 to hit you would immediately roll another d20, with only a subsequent nat 20 means there was in fact a critical hit. From what I can tell the “crit” system for the 2E ruleset is the same as 5E, with a nat 20 being an auto-crit.
Question: How is everyone dealing with this, if at all? And would it be possible to code up my above conditions for determining a critical hit.
Map/Movement Scale
Since 3E combat scale has skewed towards the 5’ square. Original 1E/2E was geared more towards the traditional 10’ square, especially when it comes to character movement and map scaling.
Question: It looks like the 2E ruleset grid is perm-set to 10’/square. Is that correct? Is there a way to change this to 5’/square? Again, how are other DMs running this?
Experience
1E/2E versions of D&D gave XP awards based on how much wealth you found/accumulated, with the most common ratio being 1EXP = 1 gold piece.
Question: Is this mechanic present/an option with the 2E ruleset? Or is wealth something you need to track outside of the PARTY SHEET/XP function? Or is this built into the Parcel function? (Apologies, I have not had a chance to test this, only just thought of it when posting this).
That is all I have for now. Thanks again to Celestian for his hard work on this product!
Cheers,
WR