2E D&D, Sourcebook Creep, and CoDzilla

[Lago PARANOIA]

A lot of people are pretty incredulous about the existence of CoDzilla being a thing before 3.0E D&D. On one hand, I don't really see how. I mean, have you looked at shit like Spells and Powers or the Complete Priest's Compendium? And the splatbook creep for 2E D&D is off the motherfucking chain. 3E and 4E D&D got nothing on 2E D&D. I'm positive that there are a few expansion options or spells lurking around in those books that made the problem even worse.

On the other hand, I'm not really sure how much it came to a head in actual play. Listening to 2E grognards, you'd get the impression that the Dungeon Master Is Always Right, Even (Especially) When He's A Moron. Not to mention that no one can really give me a good picture of what books were generically allowed. I mean, in 3.5E D&D it's generally assumed that a supermajority of tables used the Complete Series and the PHBII and no one gave you a funny look if you talked about using stuff from the Player's Guide to Faerun as if you knew ahead of time the DM wouldn't line-item veto it. I don't think a similar dynamic existed for 2E D&D. Especially because the video game adaptations almost never used anything not from the core rulebooks. I mean, Baldur's Gate used a couple of their own spells, but for the most part it was core or GTFO. What's more, the extremely obvious and easy way to make CoDzilla -- fucking dual-class, you twerp -- required stats that were nigh-impossible to roll honestly and required a pretty huge investment in time in a game full of Death no Save effects.

Anyone who can tell me who lived through these eras what's what?

[Cyberzombie]

The Players' Option: Skills and Powers cleric was absolutely nuts, you basically got way more build points than any other class, and could more or less get all the fighter perks, and still get all the spells you cared about.

[deaddmwalking]

The power-bump in 3.x to the cleric was done primarily because nobody wanted to be the cleric; the reason nobody wanted to be the cleric was you pretty much played as the 'heal-bot'.

Because it is a 'team game', the fact that you could do better with a team of all clerics never really came up. And if you could 'do it better' but your companions took a whole lot of damage, you either had to stop or you had to make sure they were doing well.

Basically, if you put everything you had into 'support' everyone could continue, but it didn't make for a very interesting character. If you put everything into 'being awesome' you could be awesome, but you wouldn't get far because the other members of the team needed your support.

To an extent, this type of relationship also existed between Fighters and Wizards. With spell interruption, you wanted a Fighter to 'block the way'. While there wasn't any official rules (that I recall) as a DM, if opponents tried to swarm past the fighter to get to the wizard, I'd give the Fighter at least one attack - so AoO existed before they existed... But certainly in narrow passages, the wizard benefitted from having someone absorbing attacks and keeping him from dealing with spell disruption.

In 2e, classes depended a little more on each other to 'shore up' certain weaknesses. Everyone relied on the cleric, so the cleric didn't have much chance to do awesome stuff.

[Stinktopus]

I seem to recall the Priest's Handbook having a spell called "Feat." The spell allowed you to successfully complete ANY ACTION YOU SPECIFIED. It came with a little bit of DM fuckery stating that the cleric casting the spell need not actually survive the task (You want to walk through the lava? Okay.) but that the cleric's corpse would finish the action if he died mid-Feat.

"You are confronted by the LORD OF VAMPIRES!!! He..."

"I cast Feat. I drive a stake through his heart."

[souran]

There are several things here


First, as CyberZombie indicated, Skills and Powers was a totally different D&D than anything else.

I owned all the Players: Option series. I have played with all the rules from all of them all at once.

The only books that work are the minatures handbook for adding 3E style combat into 2E (which I know run a game of 3E that basically uses 2Es gridless combat). And Spells and Magic which added some interesting alternative magic systems to the game that were at least playable.

Skills and Powers did indeed let you make a lot of totally outlandish characters. Letting EVERY CLASS have access to weapon specilization was not a very smart idea either. Splitting D&D ability scores into subscores was beyond stupid.

However: there was no content that actually supported Skills and Powers characters. Dragon Magazine never published a single adventure that assumed Skills and Powers was in use. None of the 2E videogames utilized any of the material from that product line. In my mind it is a dead withered vine.

The complete series, on the other hand, WAS utilized and supported. Extensively. While we have gotten a good laugh from Complete book of elves, the book of dwarves, paladins,rangers, wizards, bards, and thieves were all pretty ok. Fighter was pretty terrible. Priest was marginal except for the spells.

As for priests and spells, 2E was before the time of the wand of cure light wounds. If you DM was nice he hadned out potions of cure light wounds like crazy. If he was a jerk then your cleric used all his bonus spells for extra healing.

Also, in 2E clerics rarley took self buffs because by the time you could get your buffs cast combat was over. Generally you took 50% resorative spells and the rest were group buffs and you would cast 1 per fight. Also, if you did have a targeted buff, you were probably better off using it on a fighter who could pair it with specilization, haste, and exceptional strength to kill even tough monsters in a single turn.

Seriously, I know LOTS of people who felt that in 2E fighters were freaking superstars because nobody could smash face like they could. You cast your buffs on the fighter and then sat back while he did all the hard work. If you got attacked by the infamous random encounters of dozens or hundreds of goblins your wizard AOEd them to death and your fighter killed 3 a turn because he only missed on a 1 and always did more damage than they had health.

Also, in 2E you didn't ever count on getting any particular magic item so the warrior class features that let you have exceptional strength, lots of HP, and an extra attack were really good. Also, fighters actually had pretty good saves.

I never new anybody who abided by the level restrictions for non-human characters (Including Dragon Magazine). I also never played with a person who duel classed during a single campaign. I ran into a LOT of people who would say that they had a 7/9/13th level fighter from their brothers/cousins/best friends in another state D&D game and that they would just have him duel class to wizard and join an active game...and then get all his duel class powers back and be rediculous.

Infact, I don't think thath the gold box games let you duel class either. I think that didn't appear until Baldur's gate.

Duel Classing as a fighter->cleric wouldn't be so bad, you would have to pick your weapon from the cleric list, which would suck, but the real issue would be that you would probably get to be the CODzilla for about 2-3 sessions before the game folded. The having to play a crap character during probably the prime time of a characters in-game existince has always been the downside to duel classing.

So, basically you needed a cleric or druid in 2E. The number of Dragon adventures that say "1-4 characters one of whom is a cleric" from 1989 to 1999 is at least 90%. However, those clerics spent half there power making sure that you could move to the next encounter. The other half they used on the fighter because it resulted in defeating encounters faster than using it on themselves.

So when the preview articles for 3.0 started and they demonstrated things like spontaneous casting we adopted that into our game immediately. Clerics could then DO THINGS! When we saw all the other stuff playing the cleric went from being the thing you stuck the last person at the table with to being the thing that the first person to the game wanted to do.

[Ancient History]

This reminds me, after I finish up Shadows over Stygia I'm thinking of running an AD&D 2.x game - "Return to the Crypts of Chaos" - any interest?

[souran]

Baldur's Gate and BG II both have been rereleased recently.

You can see some of the wierdness of 2E in those games.

On the other hand there are a bunch of things that you can't see. For instance, those games don't use the actual weapon specilization rules from 2E (what they have is actually better though...)

It also doesn't actually impliment all the stats. You can't affect the moral of your party memebers by having high charisma, you can't get saving throw bonuses from high wisdom (nor become immune to charm with a 19 wisdom), constitution and dexterity give only bonuses to hp and armor class and have none of their possible saving throw affects, basically the system is only half implimented at best.

Strangely, what both games are really missing is a true combat monster NPC with high strength, good dex, and awesome HP (note that the other NPC missing from both games is a true fighter/mage of any sort). If you are not soloing the game the fastest way through it is probably as a fighter or paladin (or fighter/mage in bg II where you can make the buffs last a whole screen) who can just run up to monsters and explode them with his attack pattern.

[Stinktopus]

Infact, I don't think thath the gold box games let you duel class either. I think that didn't appear until Baldur's gate.

Duel
du·el/ˈduəl, ˈdyu-/ Show Spelled [doo-uhl, dyoo-] Show IPA
noun
1. a prearranged combat between two persons, fought with deadly weapons according to an accepted code of procedure, especially to settle a private quarrel.
2. any contest between two persons or parties.
verb (used with object), verb (used without object), du·eled, du·el·ing or ( especially British ) du·elled, du·el·ling.
3. to fight in a duel.

Dual
du·al/ˈduəl, ˈdyu-/ Show Spelled [doo-uhl, dyoo-] Show IPA
adjective
1. of, pertaining to, or noting two.
2. composed or consisting of two people, items, parts, etc., together; twofold; double: dual ownership; dual controls on a plane.
3. having a twofold, or double, character or nature.

That pet peeve out of the way...

Dual-classing was ABSOLUTELY a thing in the Gold Box Games. A Ranger 9/Magic-User 10+ was capable of casting spells in full armor and shield.

Clerics in the Gold Box games functioned as heal sticks and buffers, but the buffs scaled really poorly with level and were basically irrelevant by the time the party fighters were sporting a -8 THACO with gear. However, Clerics were fight enders with spams of four-fucking-targets Hold Person.

Fights against Clerics were save/reload affairs, with the winner being the side to first unleash a wave of Hold Person/Slay Living/Harm.[/b]

[Username17]

Certainly one big issue is that house ruling was so endemic that many rules in the book were essentially unknown. Outside of conventions and video games, I have never seen nor heard of a game that actually required a Priest to memorize spells. It just didn't happen. The in-world justification for Priest spell prep was so incoherent that peoples' brains simply rebelled and basically let Clerics cast like they were fucking Beguilers. Demihuman level limits was another one, people didn't fucking use those. I have literally never seen a table where Halflings were actually told that they couldn't gain levels anymore. And while those kinds of house rules were ubiquitous, lots of other house rules were merely extremely common. House ruling on a lot of issues was sufficiently common that playing "by the book" would get you offended looks and perplexed spit takes by people who had been conditioned to believe that the rules actually said something else.

And this was a way of life that 2nd edition specifically encouraged. If you don't count the spell, item, or monster entries, the core books contain more reminders that the DM is allowed to change the rules than they have pages. I don't think that's even an exaggeration. Zeb Cook reminds you that the DM can change the rules a lot.

Anyway, games tended to fall somewhere on what I would have described at the time as a spectrum from "mundane" to "Monty Hall" based on what kind of shit was allowed to fly. Absolutely no game allowed stuff from books unconditionally, because of course every book presented alternate incompatible options with additional caveats that the DM was free to do something else instead.

The first big break is whether you were allowed to play a +Strength race. Really, it was that simple. None of the PHB races had a bonus to Strength, and if you got a racial Strength modifier you could start the game with Giant Strength. If Wild Elves and Orcs and stuff were allowed, you could probably get away with a lot of stuff considered "somewhat cheesy" like being a Dart Specialist or taking Kits. If not, then you were in a pretty restrictive game where the DM would vet everything before you could bring it into the game and you probably couldn't take any kits except maybe the ones from the Complete Fighter because no one cares about those.

The second big break is whether you were allowed to use setting material. Forgotten Realms has always been full of crazy, and it will always be full of crazy. In the heydays of 2nd edition, there were so many settings that there was no fucking way that your DM even knew what they all were. So if your DM let you bring in stuff from Maztica or Red Steel, things were off the hook. Not because any particular thing from any particular setting was over powered or unreasonable, but simply that your DM apparently let you bring shit into the game from books he hadn't read. And for a game with as many gonzo ideas and genial contempt for game balance as 2e, that meant you were in for a potentially very bumpy ride.

But remember, a lot of games descended into incomprehensible juvenile furniture chewing. It wasn't exactly rare to hear about characters who had been given adamantine skeletons or taken Glasya as their personal concubine or something. There were games where people drew cards out of the Deck of Many Things, for fuck's sake. People fought Pit Fiends at 4th level, and won because they had been given such crazy bullshit magic items and non-item bonuses that that was a thing that could happen.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

Not to mention that no one can really give me a good picture of what books were generically allowed.

Oh. You musta thought I was kidding in the other thread. I wasn't. Lemme set ya straight kiddo, 2e really did look a whole lot like this:

Before the Soviet Breakup, this was still cheaper than bottom shelf vodka.

Anyone who can tell me who lived through these eras what's what?

Frank missed the third big break of 2e, which was whether 2.5 2e Essentials The Player's Option Skills and Powers series material was allowed. This stuff came later in the 2e lifecycle, and was a bunch of books with the same tag on each, so regardless of other rules restrictions they tended to be either batch-allowed or blanket disallowed.

[Voss]

Outside of conventions and video games, I have never seen nor heard of a game that actually required a Priest to memorize spells. It just didn't happen.
-Username17

I've never heard that one before, and I played far too much 2nd edition during high school and college. I'd grant that the memorization rules weren't followed as written, but rather hand waved as 'rested: get spells back,' but not that they didn't have to memorize spells.

So you've now officially heard of entire multi-year campaigns that required cleric spell memorization.

[
Dual-classing was ABSOLUTELY a thing in the Gold Box Games. A Ranger 9/Magic-User 10+ was capable of casting spells in full armor and shield.

Yep. Cheesing the level caps in gold box games was the reason to make an all human party and dual class the hell out of it.

Clerics in the Gold Box games functioned as heal sticks and buffers, but the buffs scaled really poorly with level and were basically irrelevant by the time the party fighters were sporting a -8 THACO with gear. However, Clerics were fight enders with spams of four-fucking-targets Hold Person.

Fights against Clerics were save/reload affairs, with the winner being the side to first unleash a wave of Hold Person/Slay Living/Harm.[/b]

Also yes. Healbot clerics were a thing, but the key to understanding them is the heal spells were restricted to specific levels, particularly before cure medium wounds got shuffled in from computer games. You stuff level 1 with cure light, and level 4 with cure serious, but levels 2,3 and 6 were stuffed with save or die/suck and animate dead (for level 3). There were also some buffs, but mostly you just broke out the 'hope the DM isn't just blatantly lying about his dice results for his saves and fucked encounters sideways.

[GnomeWorks]

Demihuman level limits was another one, people didn't fucking use those. I have literally never seen a table where Halflings were actually told that they couldn't gain levels anymore.

I've seen it.

My folks run 2e. They use demihuman level limits, partially because they're rather against the whole concept of house rules.

[Lago PARANOIA]

My folks run 2e. They use demihuman level limits, partially because they're rather against the whole concept of house rules.

No house rules for 2E D&D? I am truley sorry for your lots.

[Voss]

I actually don't find it that strange. Houserules often became this thing where one of three things happened:

1) most commonly (by a hell of a lot), people just handwaved shit that they didn't know (really common) or didn't want to deal with (less common).

2) people created fucking binders of this shit, and had pages and pages of crap that basically amount to 2 or 3 separate splats for their own personal campaign. Players (especially if it was a long term group) didn't want to deal with that.

3) as a reaction to #2, others gained a real knee-jerk 'house rules are for bad DMs/bad players' vibe and refused to use them at all.

As splats and (worse) skills and powers happened, things often became 'fuck it' and people just gave up. I know most of the games I was in basically came down to whatever people remembered at the time, and often that meant something getting pulled out of an ass and we fucking winged it. I can remember one case that involved the party fighting a single mundane giant lizard (of 17 hp) and one player came up with some fucking convoluted plan involving a tapestry, corralling it, and basically binding it up so it couldn't fight. Rather than deal with it in any rules or dice rolling fashion, I just had him take a round to pull the tapestry off the wall, another to drag the tapestry over and by the time his init had rolled around again and he was going to 'net' it, the rest of the party had killed the fucking trivial encounter monster. I certainly wasn't going to break out the absurd and terrible grapple and net rules for 2nd edition. The player wasn't happy, and I felt a little guilty, but I was not going to deal with that terrible, terrible shit. (assuming I could have found the net rules in whatever splat they were hiding in (complete fighter's, I suspect).

[GnomeWorks]

No house rules for 2E D&D? I am truley sorry for your lots.

Yeah, it was... well, I mean, as a kid, I didn't know any better, so I just dealt with it.

What's worse is that it wasn't just no house rules, it was nothing beyond core. Just the PH, DMG, and MM. I guess a lot of the splats for 2e were mechanically weird, though, so maybe it's a wash? I don't know.

Oh, and the weird rule that you weren't allowed to even so much as have a DMG at the table, unless you were the DM.

[Voss]

Oh, and the weird rule that you weren't allowed to even so much as have a DMG at the table, unless you were the DM.

Ah. That sounds like the played 1st (or earlier) and kept the legacy of 'players should not be allowed to know how the game really works' as sacred writ.

[GnomeWorks]

Ah. That sounds like the played 1st (or earlier) and kept the legacy of 'players should not be allowed to know how the game really works' as sacred writ.

His preferred game was 1e, I think the only reason he ran 2e was because my mother preferred it (and I will be the first to admit that I find it strange that one can have a preference between the two, they're pretty much identical near as I can tell).

They've tried a number of other games in the past couple decades - HackMaster 4e, Castles & Crusades, probably at least one other - but they keep going back to D&D 2e.

And keep in mind all these games are played as written, with no modifications... the HackMaster era was painful, and when I finally had enough (both of their preferred systems and their general style). That "game" is a fucking abomination.

[Mord]

His preferred game was 1e, I think the only reason he ran 2e was because my mother preferred it (and I will be the first to admit that I find it strange that one can have a preference between the two, they're pretty much identical near as I can tell).

They've tried a number of other games in the past couple decades - HackMaster 4e, Castles & Crusades, probably at least one other - but they keep going back to D&D 2e.

And keep in mind all these games are played as written, with no modifications... the HackMaster era was painful, and when I finally had enough (both of their preferred systems and their general style). That "game" is a fucking abomination.

This is kind of like reading the memoirs of someone who grew up Amish or Scientologist or a snake handler or something. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess (hope?) that you have some good stories about playing 2e D&D with your parents.

[GnomeWorks]

This is kind of like reading the memoirs of someone who grew up Amish or Scientologist or a snake handler or something. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess (hope?) that you have some good stories about playing 2e D&D with your parents.

Unfortunately, not particularly. My parents are... kind of weird people, honestly, with a lot of odd cognitive dissonance going on. I technically wasn't allowed to play D&D - at all - until I was almost in high school, because... reasons? It's been awhile (14-ish years), so hard for me to recall.

I do know that my mother's preferred character archetype is a stick-in-the-mud LG paladin: Miko struck me as only a slight exaggeration of what I've witnessed. Arguments about alignment still kind of strike a bit close to home for me, because those were the kinds of things I'd argue with my parents about as part of my teenage rebellion thing (lame, yes, I know).

I also wasn't allowed to play video games or watch any appreciable amount of TV or movies until shortly before I turned 18, and didn't have reasonable access to a radio or music they didn't prefer (on CD and such; 80's metal and classical, almost exclusively) until about 16.

[Voss]

This is kind of like reading the memoirs of someone who grew up Amish or Scientologist or a snake handler or something. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess (hope?) that you have some good stories about playing 2e D&D with your parents.

Unfortunately, not particularly. My parents are... kind of weird people, honestly, with a lot of odd cognitive dissonance going on. I technically wasn't allowed to play D&D - at all - until I was almost in high school, because... reasons? It's been awhile (14-ish years), so hard for me to recall.

I do know that my mother's preferred character archetype is a stick-in-the-mud LG paladin: Miko struck me as only a slight exaggeration of what I've witnessed. Arguments about alignment still kind of strike a bit close to home for me, because those were the kinds of things I'd argue with my parents about as part of my teenage rebellion thing (lame, yes, I know).

Between those two paragraphs, I now have a bizarre mental image of you as 15 year old in a parody of those old anti-pot ads, where you're parents had caught you secretly playing RPGs and you scream 'I learned it from watching you!' while various gamer stereotypes watch the unfolding spectacle uncomfortably.

'How dare you be Chaotic Neutral in this house!'

[tussock]

Anyone who can tell me who lived through these eras what's what?

There's three, maybe four kinds of Clerics in 2nd edition. They're all pretty good, mechanically fight-winners, other than how your class has a gotcha where the DM gets to ruin your party even harder than everyone else's.

[*]There's the basic core dude who only ever casts Cure Light Wounds, Hold Person, Cure Moderate Wounds, and Cure Critical Wounds. No one actually got past 8th level, so that's it. There are better spells, but you're not allowed to cast them, healbot.

[*]There's the one saying "I bought the Complete Book of Clerics and my character got worse". Which is sad, because the Complete Book of Fighters made them into demons. Anyway, you couldn't even make a core Cleric with that book, it's harsh.

[*]There's people who bought the Forgotten Realms books, where Clerics are amazeballs and better than you in every way imaginable. Like, have all Rogue skills, or all Mage spells, or all Fighter stats and abilities, often still using the Cleric table for XP because it's all free. With the proviso of randomly having the DM screw you over in ways that most other classes did not suffer.

[*]And there's the "we're bankrupt, so here's some untested garbage in hardcover, please buy them" Player's Option clerics. Maybe people used them to min-max, but I think people mostly played it like core because otherwise it doesn't work. But those books are terrible and make every other possible D&D character ever look pathetic if you do use them as written.


3e Clerics are designed to fix complaints about the first two types of Cleric (because most people just played core and maybe had the Cleric book if they cared), by taking the rules from the 3rd and 4th types of Clerics and powering them up slightly.

Also, there are no restrictions in 3rd edition because saying "Yes" was the new black, and the only real thing that made Clerics bad in 2nd edition was the thing where the DM can fuck with you non-stop written right into the class description. Which I may have been guilty of taking as written, at the time, pre-internet, simply didn't know any better.



Side Note: There were literally thousands of books for 2nd edition and they almost all didn't make your characters any better. There are hidden crazy combos everywhere but the internet simply wasn't there to let most groups even know they existed, even if someone in your group had a room packed floor to ceiling with D&D books (as mine did). "People mostly played core" is true even of groups where there was a Bladesinger or a Dwarf with all the attachments for 9+ attacks, because most people didn't have access to the rules and someone still had to play the Cleric anyway.

[Username17]

The Complete Book of Priests is a weird weird book, and peoples' reactions to it are all over the place. One of the first things it does is straight up say front and center that the basic Cleric in the PHB is overpowered and specialty priests are going to have less tools in their bag than that.

The next thing they do is give you a bunch of dials to pretty much make a new class from scratch using the Cleric spheres and a bunch of other crap. There's a very loose set of guidelines, but those guidelines were insane. Things came in level ranges, so even though an ability coming in a level later was obviously worse than getting it now, you might not get anything for it. But the big deal was that you weren't trading in spell power or even particularly spells per day (although you could get spell-like abilities in addition to your spell slots, which was kind of like getting extra spells per day), you were trading in spell selection.

So if you made a very "caster" Priest, you sucked balls. You traded away hit points and armor proficiency and all you got out of it was less spell selection than Clerics normally got for free. Seriously, it was less, because 90% of players didn't even realize that there were spells in the PHB Priest list that were nominally not supposed to be on the Cleric's list. Meanwhile, if you made a very "warrior" Priest, you were a fucking terror. You could get Fighter hit dice, fighter weapon specialization, and while you had a very short list of spells to cast you still got a full compliment of spell slots. And what spells you did cast were cast at full normal effect.

The Skills & Powers Priest was kind of the same thing, except that instead of giving you less points than was required to build a normal Cleric, they gave you more. I know, the Complete Priest's Handbook used brackets rather than points, but the effect was the same. Of course, Skills & Powers came out in 1995, and I have never seen a game that allowed it (I knew people who allowed Combat & Tactics, but Skills & Powers was always a balking point because it was so obviously insane).

-Username17

[tussock]

Yeh, all I saw made from the Priests book was the warrior types and while they sucked not that much harder as a caster, they also sucked a bit less as a Fighter at the same time. Margins of suck did not popular characters make.

But that was big parties with plenty of melee muscle up front (and spare capacity from muscle Henchmen) so that a fighting priest was very much a 5th wheel.

[talozin]

To draw an analogy, someone allowing Skills & Powers in their game was the rough equivalent of a 3E game that allowed Unearthed Arcana style gestalt characters. Yeah, it happened, but mostly its utility was as something for theoretical charop people to fap over.

Allowing the Complete Book of X was like allowing Complete Warrior et al. It was very common, but you're always going to get some hardliners who look with suspicion at anything other than the core books because it's likely to contain a lot of imbalanced bullshit. (Generally they were right about that; they were just wrong in thinking that the core books were a balanced starting state.)

Setting-specific stuff was ... it depended on the stuff. The ridiculous specialty priests from Powers & Pantheons et al. were like, let's say, Magic of Faerun. But if there was some player-directed crunch in the actual basic setting material (like the special rules in the Red Steel boxed set, say), then you would probably be allowed to use that, with some allowance for how vital the special rules were to the "feel" of the setting.

[nockermensch]

Outside of conventions and video games, I have never seen nor heard of a game that actually required a Priest to memorize spells. It just didn't happen.
-Username17

I've never heard that one before, and I played far too much 2nd edition during high school and college. I'd grant that the memorization rules weren't followed as written, but rather hand waved as 'rested: get spells back,' but not that they didn't have to memorize spells.

What made my group start doing spell memorisation was the 3.0e Sorcerer. By explicitly having a class whose entire advantage was to spontaneously cast their known spells they kind of forced us to play wizards and priests in the right way.

We had years long 2e campaigns where everybody casted as a sorcerer, and we were fine with it.