D&D 2E AD&D 2E - Broken Kits

[pdiddy]

There are no broken kits - just DMs who haven't considered how kits fit into their campaign.

Kits aren't meant to be taken all-inclusively. They should be carefully considered with regards to the campaign world and the style of play before they are included.

 

[TerraDave]

Some Bads:

As implied above, there is heavy reliance on rp penalties that could be hard to interpret or work into play and were usually ignored.

As admitted by people who worked on 2E, there was power creep, and basically had to be to get people to buy and use these books.

As with so much in 2E (ok RPGs, ok ok life in general) these were very much made up as things went along and so you have big differences across kits.

The Good

With 20/20 hindsight, kits were a simple and sometimes very effective way to customize charecters. The fighter ones, which were first, made the class far more versatile and made it easy to play a rang of archetypal charecters. As noted by Crothain, the Bard ones also really opened up that class.

On a user note: Player Option: Skills and Powers (note, use this book with care!) has a complete list of kits that may be a little more balanced with each other. But I am not really vouching for it.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

Had one in my campaign. When we converted to 3e he actually became less powerful. This is a very overpowered kit.

Well, 3E did seem to make archery less powerful (read: underpowered) than in 2E, so there's that. Also, the magic users got significant boosts in 3E, which I would think would also make the archer look like less of a king by comparison, too.

Wish I remembered the initiative rules better so I could say for certain, but wasn't an archer FAR more devastating at disrupting casters in 2E, with how the initiative system worked in that edition?

 

[billd91]

Wish I remembered the initiative rules better so I could say for certain, but wasn't an archer FAR more devastating at disrupting casters in 2E, with how the initiative system worked in that edition?

Yes, but then, everyone was. If you went before the wizard, hitting him at all would disrupt the spell (no concentration roll). There was no need to hold an action to wait until he started casting. He was effectively assumed to be casting the whole round until his initiative roll came up. So arrows, crossbow bolts, daggers, darts, spells with a lower casting time like magic missile, and more all had a good chance of shutting down the spellcaster with a poor initiative roll. You had to declare it before you rolled initiative and go with the roll but that was comparatively small potatoes.

 

[slwoyach]

I found kits to be necessary to make a believable character. Even with kits, characters received too few proficiencies to be a well-rounded character.

My favorite unbalanced kit was Myrmidon from Complete Fighter. The benefit is you get a free weapon specialization. The drawback is that you're part of a mercenary group that sometimes requires you to go someplace and fight (or whatever mercenaries are hired to do). So the drawback is either a plot hook or something that takes the PC out of the game for a while. I could never figure out a good way to use it in a game.

The easiest way to incorperate the myrmidon is to have him be a personal bodyguard of another PC, preferably the wizard. If the dm really wants to make it a drawback he can create an NPC that needs to be guarded. Trying to keep a 0-level NPC alive in an AD&D campaign (think the princess in Conan the Destroyer) is a huge drawback.

 

[Odhanan]

One complaint I've heard leveled at 2nd edition AD&D as I read through a bunch of different message boards these days, is that many of the kits were horribly unbalanced.

Hey, Hans!

My advice: don't care about this.

"Game (which really means "rules" here) balance" is a BS concept that belongs to 3rd ed and later. Game balance happens not because of the rules, but because of the people around the table and the synergy that takes place between them as they play the game. Good, Fair GM + Good, Fair Players = Game Balance.

That's *it*. The rest is marketing BS. Some Kool-Aid to get you to buy more stuff.

Just play the darn game. Or as a friend of mine would say: "Shut the f up and roll the dice".

 

[Crothian]

I found kits to be necessary to make a believable character. Even with kits, characters received too few proficiencies to be a well-rounded character.

I think that may have been your problem as 2e characters were not meant to be well rounded.