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Player's Handbook Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (2nd Ed Fantasy Roleplaying) |  | Author: David Zeb Cook
Publisher: TSR Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy Used: $4.99
as of 9/5/2010 00:50 MDT details
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Seller: Goodwill BookWorks
Rating:  122 reviews
Sales Rank: 160586
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 2nd
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.2
Dimensions (in): 10.8 x 8.3 x 0.8
ISBN: 0786903295
Dewey Decimal Number: 794
EAN: 9780786903290
ASIN: 0786903295
Publication Date: April 25, 1995
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Player's Handbook Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (2nd Ed Fantasy Roleplaying)
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 122
 The best for the best. February 10, 2010
Aaron Sutherland (Newburgh, IN USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Where, oh where, to start? Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is a RPG in a league all it's own. When I first started playing RPGs I started with D&D 3rd edition and it was okay. I always felt that the rules in it were too much like a video game and put too many limits on my characters. Second edition is completely different. When AD&D was created it was during a time when you still needed to be creative to play a RPG. The rules are perfect for creating vast and wonderful characters. The game also keeps in mind that your DM is basically the boss. He decides what happens and where the party goes, it doesn't say you should put up with a jerk but you shouldn't be one either. This book is the Player's Handbook. It contains all the information and rules you need to create a character from the basic classes and races. It also explains the rules for combat, healing, equipment, magic spells, and everything else you need to play the game. It works best if you have the Dungeon Master's Handbook and Monstrous Manual with it.
Though I love second edition I know that it's not for everyone. If you like playing things like Dungeons & Dragons but you like it feeling like Final Fantasy, where your character is set and you don't have to be creative, than you might as well stick to one of the newer editions. Second edition was made so you could be creative and interact with people. If you can't/don't wanna be creative and only want to go into dungeons and level up than play 4th edition. AD&D is for the creative elite in a way but I extremely suggest you give it a try and see how wonderful your campaigns can be in it. The freedom and realistic was the rules works will be sure to please.
The second edition of second edition February 8, 2010
Michigoon (Mid-MI)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
First off, note that there are in fact two versions of AD&D- there's the original version penned by Gary Gygax, and the new version written by the TSR staff which really has little to do whatsoever with the Gary Gygax version aside from keeping a similar theme and keeping a few ideas in place here and there (mostly spell descriptions, really). This item page is for that second edition, even though a lot of reviewers (and sellers) are still confusing the two editions.
How can you tell it's the second versus first edition? First off, the artwork is different. The old one is from the Gary Gygax era of terrible pencil sketches (even if I do still love the old art style), the second edition is a vastly higher-quality book with tons of color, where they actually hired good artists and printed on glossy pages. The first edition used arbitrary tables for... everything. How do you know if your fighter can hit a skeleton? Take all the numbers involved, find the appropriate tables, and roll versus the difficulty you get from the lookup. Second edition actually tried to include some formulas wherever it could, so you can do a lot without having to crack open a book every time.
On flavor, the editions are not really comparable. Gygax's book is extremely old-school, steeped in literature like The Lord of the Rings and Conan the Barbarian. There's nudity in the art, and tons of the genre's inherent sexism from those days. Male characters are advised to have higher strength, and so forth. It's not that Gygax himself was sexist, it's that his system was brutally honest in recreating the old works. The new edition first of all throws out the nudity and gender differences (mostly) in favor of reaching a broader audience. Because of legal concerns, TSR also renamed demons and devils into Tanar'ri and Baetzu among other puzzling changes. It's basically the same core game, but it has everything to do with usability and almost nothing to do with truly honoring the literature on which the original game was based.
And really, the differences eventually add up to a shift in style. Gary Gygax played a lot of old miniatures-based wargames. His editions really had the assumption that you were like him, steeped in wargaming, and that you were looking to add some roleplay to your games. Just reading AD&D first edition, it's almost entirely unplayable on its own. Critical aspects of combat are vague at best and completely arbitrary or cumbersome if they were explained. Second edition fixed a lot of the playability issues, striking what is probably the best balance between being true to the old-school nature of the games (thieves still backstab), while being playable.
Everything you need really is in the second edition book, it's just that the layout is terrible, so in practice the game is still hard to play until you've really memorized the book. In the 2ed book, you might find that a critical portion of the combat chapter was for some reason put in the section describing the fighter class, or portions of the magic system buried in the description of the mage class, or other parts of the fighting system for some reason show up in the equipment chapter. You'll often find yourself combing the book for minutes/hours on end trying to find some rule you remember reading, because it was not intuitively placed.
So which edition should you get? Honestly, if you intend to play this game, the second edition is vastly superior. The print quality is much higher, the system plays much better (or at all), and for all its faults it's a very fun ride. I actually had more fun playing AD&D second than any other version of D&D. If you've already played second edition, or you're a game designer looking for ideas, definitely grab first edition as soon as possible. First is vastly superior in terms of flavor, and it has the elusive Gygax factor. Old-school players harp on this a lot, but Gygax was an absolute genius in terms of game design. Even he freely admitted to the problems with AD&D, often in the commentary he wrote while penning AD&D, but there's a treasure trove of insight into why he made the game the way he did. The notes he puts throughout his books makes them incredible sources of knowledge for long-time players and game designers alike.
Or in short, get second edition AD&D first because it's more playable, and get first edition AD&D immediately thereafter like it's the bonus "behind the scenes" feature.
A 21 on a D20 December 8, 2009
David Tyler Wright
Great book, a little lacking in the pictures but hey it was amazing. Very informative and an excellent addition to any DnD library. Use it every week in the campaign
Great classic D&D product August 29, 2009
Darvin L. Martin (Philadelphia, PA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Delivery was fast. The book was wrapped several times for protection. As promised it was in good condition with just a little wear on the cover. No marks inside.
 crappy condition April 30, 2009
Paul (Ann Arbor, MI)
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
It gets 2 stars only because it was advertised as being "good" condition, yet when it arrived, it was in very poor condition. The biding was all taped up, the cover was worn to crap, and the book had been waterlogged. I would reccomend the Player's Handbook 2nd Edition, but I wouldn't buy it from the seller I did, which was "A1 Treasurepointbooks"
Showing reviews 1-5 of 122
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