I tried to play AD&D 2nd edition

In my gaming, I like trying out new stuff, and often buy a product for a one-off session. Sometimes I happen to buy some old stuff to try out as well. I never got into D&D until 3rd edition. My group in the late 90’s played an unholy bastardization of BRP, AD&D and the Swedish Drakar och Demoner.
I did spend the early aughts deeply immersed in Baldur’s Gate, Planescape Torment and Neverwinter Nights, though, so it’s no like I’m unaware of how D&D worked before 3rd. Thanks to those games, I’ve picked up quite a bit of Planescape books, some other boxes and books and odd bits of AD&D stuff, and when early D&D stuff has been free on various e-commerce sites.
Among the piles of papers and PDFs I had Keep on the Borderlands both in its original version, and the new, colorful and beautiful one that Alex Damaceno has put together.

I decided that I wanted to run it in some way, and gave my group the choice of trying out Against the Darkmaster or to play it in AD&D. The vote was close, but AD&D obviously won, which is spoiled in the name of this post. Everyone wanted THAC0 and we have been playing a lot of Rolemaster and MERP these last couple of decades. We ended up playing the original Keep on the Borderlands, since we were all out of hex paper but had a whole lot of grid papers, which fit with the maps of the Keep, it’s surroundings and the CAVES!

Right, enough background and on to impressions, I guess. Making characters was easy. Rolling for stats cut down on a lot of the min-maxing, but allowing to move attributes around can induce some analysis paralysis. But overall the character creation process was smooth, specially when playing bare bones and skipping everything that sets characters apart from one another, like proficiencies. So all characters were just horrible using whatever weapon they chose to wield. Thankfully the mage/thief elf managed to roll that color spray was one of his starting spells, which was useful later on.

The party ended up being the aforementioned elf mage/thief, a gnomish cleric/thief, and two human fighters. The ease of character creation was appreciated when the fighters managed to get killed off one after the other, and being replaced by new human fighters cut from the same mold, since one level one fighter is basically indistinguishable from another.

All the players irregardless of experience level managed to grok the system pretty quick, which is positive, but as a GM I was a bit surprised that they managed to fit so little information in all those pages. The game leaves a bunch of stuff to the GM’s imagination, like how to decide mage starting spells, there’s no examples of deities with spheres which is kinda needed to decide what spells the clerics get, and so on.
All in all though, the game was easy to run with pretty much no prep, and the players enjoyed it. I can think of a lot of games that are more fun, easier to run, and helps me more as a GM with less pages.

But on the other hand it was easy enough, the players enjoyed it and it was quite nostalgic for most of us, even though we never played it in paper before. I guess we’ll keep exploring the wilderness around the keep for a couple sessions more.