Anyone here used any of, or all of the three player's options books here on RPOL? Did they work well?

By this I mean: Player's Options: Combat and Tactics, Player's Options: Spells and Magic, and Player's Options: Skills and Powers. Trying to find out if they work well enough for an online environment, since I've only used them for  tabletop.
This message was last edited by the user at 18:08, Sun 27 Mar 2022.

which books ? I know of a lot more than 3 option books for AD&D - I got a cabinet full of 'option books' for 2cd edition alone.

I would assume they're talking about, Player's Options: Combat and Tactics, Player's Options: Spells and Magic, and Player's Options: Skills and Powers. I've never used them on RPoL, but used them extensively when they came out years ago.

In reply to Prince of Boredom (msg # 3):


 Yes, those books.

And I probably should have posted this after I had coffee.

Let me explain, or at least make a solid  stab at it: this will be my first attempt at running a game, with backup, and I was thinking of using these books as part of my game.  However, before fully setting this in motion, and having a possible disaster, I thought I'd pick the brains of those that have already done this.  I mean if someone else has tried this and had problems, it would be nice to be aware of them.

There was a thread not too long ago that summed up the differences between editions.

link to a message in another game

I mention it because the Player's Option stuff sort of nudged 2nd edition into a bit of a 2.5 (before 3.0 came along, I mean). A lot more rules for a lot more things.


(Not trying to steer the conversation into an edition discussion — 2nd edition was good at some stuff, 3rd edition was good at others — just mentioning that they were, at their core, very different)

I guess what I'm saying is that a 2nd edition tale that included the Player's Option stuff could work fine IF everyone was on the same page.

If some folks were playing a 2nd edition narrative game, however, and the others were playing a more 2.5 numbers-based, 'I built my guy for a mechanical edge' sort of game ... those differences would hinder the game.

As a first game out of the gate, I would be wary of adding a bunch of rules that may or may not be fully understood by everyone at the table.

The extra crunch might seem worth it, but in my opinion, it isn't worth it if it leads to confusion and rules-lawyering.

Whatever you choose ... best of luck!

I would tend to agree with Ski-Bird. While it's probably been about 25 years since I've touched those books, I can remember that my core graming group was super excited and we incorporated them fairly quickly into our games. I think for us, having played D&D for so long, it was cool to have the ability to customize your characters even more. But I think the biggest thing we like was the alternate magic systems. We had grown to dislike the limitations of the Vancian magic system, and were big fans of a system I believe called channeling in the Spells and Magic book. On a side note, I still don't like the Vancian system, which is why 5e is my favorite edition.

But, to get back to what Ski-Bird said, the Player's Options books do push 2e closer to 3e, but I'd say with even less (if that's possible) balance between the various options. It is very easy for someone who knows the rules well to make an overpowered, min-maxed character, while someone else can make a super under-powered character using the same rules. Because of that, there has to be a ton of DM intervention to ensure and relatively equal playing field across the game.

So I would stay away from using those books, especially in your first game, as RPoL is not the best medium for games that require a lot of DM intervention during character creation, since most of it is done offline and lots of assumptions get made.

I haven't looked at them for a couple of decades either, but from what I do remember, the "build your own class" aspect of Skills and Powers was particularly suspect in its quality and balancing (in both directions), so I'd give that one a miss, especially if you or any of the players are unfamiliar with the 2E system to begin with.

The other two were less prone to causing a mess and had some really good bits to adopt even if the entire books weren't in use, but once again, that'll depend heavily on everyone's familiarity with the system.
This message was last edited by the user at 04:39, Mon 28 Mar 2022.

In reply to Ski-Bird (msg # 6):


 Thank you, and thank you.

I've been playing in a 2.5 game elsewhere for half a dozen years or so, and from a player end, after chargen, it's not all that different in gameplay from 2e. And it's kind of cool to be able to add or boost skills with earned CPs as time goes on. Our DM often makes select new skills available at a discount, a one-time offer, if it was a skill exercised in a just-concluded story chapter. That's nice, too, and encourages adding skills that don't necessarily benefit the character in any combat-geared way.

It's certainly valid that the system can be abused by min-maxers, requiring more work from the DM to watch for it to rein it in. I don't think I'll every run a game using it -- too much extra work for me! But as far as I can see, it plays well enough in the PbP format