Diary of a Failed Game Designer

Two years ago, almost to the month I wrote my deep dive on Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd edition Players Option Skills and powers. (TSR 2154.) An article I was pretty proud of at the time, even if only Russian web bots ever read it. Then the world fell apart. A pandemic made camp here in New York, hasn't left yet. For about a year my job went from how I make a living to how I lived. Furthermore, I have by any real measure stopped gaming. I even took this Blogg completely down for nearly 2 years. It's been a strange, sad, busy time. I kept occasionally thinking about The Players options books. How they seem to have been forgotten. Or if not forgotten dismissed. In reality I would love to ask the author how the Players Options books came about. I would like to know what their internal dialogs and the internal discussions at TSR were while the books were in production. With that in mind, I'm going to embark on part 2 of the AD&D 2ed Player's Option deep dive. Featu...

AD&D Player Options: “Skills and Powers” I have gotten the feeling over the years that this was not the most well thought of book from the 2 nd edition library. I have read that it over complicates character creation, That it's simply ripe for min-maxing and exploitation. These things may well be true.  Strangely I feel it’s kind of been forgotten. More to the point passed over. People still playing 2 nd ed play it strait, rules as written. “2154 Skills and powers”, “2149 Combat and Tactics,” and “2163 Spells and Magic” are three books that have been deemed either harmful to the games purity or worse simply unnecessary. Back in 1995 I bought “Skills and Powers.” At the time it was a revelation. Here in this book I had a way to ‘Build Characters” with out having to dive into GURPS which was pumping out 3 rd edition books at a breakneck pace, or Hero which was already on it’s 4 th edition by then. It changed the game in some very real ways. In fact I can say that I don’t th...