Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Core Rules 2.0 Expansion CD-ROM

Rating:
Summary: A Great Tool Package For Serious AD&D Players And DMs
Review: AD&D Core Rules 2.0 on CD-ROM is a great tool package for serious AD&D enthusiasts, players and DMs alike. The high quality of this new release is a great relief after the poor showing of the first version.

Program tools include complete text of nine key rule books, a character generator, improved dungeon, city and wilderness mapmakers, dice roller software, and a DM's toolkit with programs for automatically generating encounters, treasure troves, spells, NPCs, and more.

Mapping is provided through two different programs, the Map Maker and the Campaign Mapper. The former quickly creates City, Dungeon, and Overland maps, with neatly detailed symbols and some randomized variety in repetitive, placed features such as trees, houses, and mountains. The Campaign Mapper is much more complex, and will be very familiar to users of ProFantasy's Campaign Cartographer. In this program, maps are built in multiple layers and encounter data can be linked to the maps. Grids toggle on and off in either program; printing is available in both black-and-white and color. Both programs are miles beyond the original Core Rules map generator and an invaluable aid to the DM tired-to-death of graph paper and smudges.

The highly-detailed character generator can be set for either Core or "Player's Option" rules, and quickly creates fully-equipped PCs and any level of NPCs complete with spells, skills, and, if desired, random names (some strange but interesting results, a feature probably of more use to the DM). Twelve methods of characteristic generation are provided, from straight "you're-stuck-with-these-stats" to the manual entry of numbers. An optional "city" interface provides "buildings" to visit for creating all of the character's various skills and items.

Nine on-line books are included: Monstrous Manual, Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master Guide, Arms & Equipment Guide, Tome of Magic, Dungeon Master Option: High Level Campaigns, and the three Player's Option books: Combat & Tactics, Skills & Powers, and Spells & Magic. No pictures, all text, but quite a treasure trove for the price of the program, considering the price of acquiring physical copies of all of the books.

Encounters and monsters (lair and wandering), treasures, and NPCs are quickly set up by the DM toolkit. The installed database is customizable for house rules, letting DMs add their own monsters, character races, equipment, skills/proficiencies, magic items, racial abilities, powers, and spells, a flexibility sorely lacking in the previous version.

The value of this CD-ROM for the DM is enormous. Several of the various areas of the program can be run simultaneously, a great convenience for writing an adventure (the cyber equivalent of spreading out your books). For a pressing game deadline, reference sheets can be quickly printed, fast dice "rolled," and NPCs and encounters swiftly generated, with the creation of maps probably taking the most time. With all this, all the DM needs is a good idea!

--Sharon Daugherty for Skirmisher Online Gaming Magazine

Rating:
Summary: Useful And Fun
Review: For a AD&D player this is a great program, but they missed a few "marks". They need to include items for world specific priests and kits for other classes. They mention kits for the various classes, but they are not included in the final calculations of a character. It would also be nice to have specialty priests included also.

Rating:
Summary: Should Have Been Included in Core Rules
Review: I don't give this three stars because it's a particularly bad product. I give it three stars because I should not have had to buy it. What this product gives you is the ability to create characters with the complete handbook kits. It also supplies the handbooks in computerized form. However, the complete handbook and its kits should have been included in the core rules! Just another example of me getting bent over by TSR\WotC, of well. I won't let their greed stop me from having fun. If you do use kits get this product; creating the kits on your own with the core rules is a nightmare. Also get it if you don't have the complete handbooks (I already had them all) that is if you don't mind viewing them on the computer with no pictures.

Another note: Specialty Priests are not included, but this is not a surprise. The core rules\expansion is designed for generic 2nd ed AD&D and to make specialty priests would have meant being game world specific. Maybe TSR\WotC will make a patch for specialty priests for the realms and greyhawk. This will only happen if we pester them endlessly until they summit.

isn't there a spell for this. Hmmmm... Hobbs's Endless Irritator... Hmmm

Rating:
Summary: Nice package
Review: I love the character creation portion of this CD-ROM. It lets you roll your base stats as many times as you want to sit there. Thus you don't have to settle for that character with a 3 str if you don't want to, but then again some of us are up for the challenge.

The library of books is the right collection of all the necessary core books that an adventureres would need.

The map generator is ok. I wanted something more but this functions for most new adventures. The tool(s) are better for creating wilderness adventures and take a lot more patience when trying to create a town or city. I actually used it to help me run a Palladium:Rifts adventure...a town or wilderness is a town or wilderness. The map is a functional tool.

For those that don't want to bother with 3rd edition and get back to some using 2nd edition, this CD-ROM has all the necessary materials. It is especially useful if you have a laptop because you can bring the laptop to the gaming session vs. have to lug 12+ books with you. Much lighter. :)

I would check on ebay for the best deals on this software. But it is worth getting if just to have.

Rating:
Summary: One step closer to ditching all my old hard/softcovers...
Review: I realize that this product is based on the idea of the "Core Rules" for the AD&D game, but this was supposed to be the "Expansion" on those Core Rules -- hence the inclusion of the "Complete" series of Class & Race books. Where they dropped the ball, in my opinion, was not including the Forgotten Realms Adventures hardcover material, as well as the Faiths & Avatars and Powers & Pantheons supplements. These three books contain loads of invaluable source info for mages and specialty priests. Second, the fact that the program seems to lack the ability to factor in kit bonuses during PC/NPC creation is, well, annoying at the least, and frustrating at its worst.

That said, the rest of the product is wonderful. The hyper-linked, help file version of the books is awesome; I carry my laptop loaded with this program to every gaming session I go to, whether I'm playing or GMing. No longer do I have to carry 4 hardcovers and multiple softcovers to have the information I need. I have stats, indexed and searchable documents, dice rollers, maps, and PC/NPC character sheets all at my beckon call. And, in most cases, I can find an item, spell description, or rule in one of the books in less time than someone else can whip out their book and look it up.

One of the knocks I've heard about the Expansion is that, since 3rd edition will render it obsolete in less than a year, it's not worth buying. Please, people! Its a small price to pay for the convience of having all these resources at your finger-tips, even if it is only for the next 9 months. When I bought mine, I knew I'd be getting about a year's worth of use out of it, so it was definitely worth it, but even if I hadn't bought it then, I'd still find it a deal at this price now...

Rating:
Summary: Awesome and indespensible during play
Review: I realize that this product is based on the idea of the "Core Rules" for the AD&D game, but this was supposed to be the "Expansion" on those Core Rules -- hence the inclusion of the "Complete" series of Class & Race books. Where they dropped the ball, in my opinion, was not including the Forgotten Realms Adventures hardcover material, as well as the Faiths & Avatars and Powers & Pantheons supplements. These three books contain loads of invaluable source info for mages and specialty priests. Second, the fact that the program seems to lack the ability to factor in kit bonuses during PC/NPC creation is, well, annoying at the least, and frustrating at its worst.

That said, the rest of the product is wonderful. The hyper-linked, help file version of the books is awesome; I carry my laptop loaded with this program to every gaming session I go to, whether I'm playing or GMing. No longer do I have to carry 4 hardcovers and multiple softcovers to have the information I need. I have stats, indexed and searchable documents, dice rollers, maps, and PC/NPC character sheets all at my beckon call. And, in most cases, I can find an item, spell description, or rule in one of the books in less time than someone else can whip out their book and look it up.

One of the knocks I've heard about the Expansion is that, since 3rd edition will render it obsolete in less than a year, it's not worth buying. Please, people! Its a small price to pay for the convience of having all these resources at your finger-tips, even if it is only for the next 9 months. When I bought mine, I knew I'd be getting about a year's worth of use out of it, so it was definitely worth it, but even if I hadn't bought it then, I'd still find it a deal at this price now...

Rating:
Summary: Holes
Review: There are major holes in this software if your doing any of the TSR campaign setting. It doesn't cover gods and the kits can be a pain to fit in. The software has limits on how well things are linked up. If your running "Plane Scape" or "Ravenloft" don't waist your time here. You can add the races and classes for these settings but the time it would take you to add these races isn't worth the effort. Crack the books open.

With that said here are the good parts. You can make new monsters, races and classes. You can do some mapping and you have all the core books. I don't know about a lot of you but I'm not looking forward to 3rd edition. This product gives you the core books on disk so if you want to play 2nd edition you have them forever. We all know how well the TSR books are made. Any one remember "Unearthed Arcana" I do.