AD&D: Player's Option

[tauknight]

Which optional rules do you think are good or bad and why.

[TheElf]

First of all: AD&D: Player's Option is a line of rulebooks, and it isn't all optional rules, we speak about a few books there:

Player's Option: Combat and Tactics
Player's Option: Skills and Powers
Player's Option: Spells and Magic
DM's Option: High Level Campaigns

Some would say, it is a different edition of AD&D and D&D, it has significant advantages over normal 2nd edition AD&D, and also it has significant flaws. Even with the significant flaws, I would consider it as a visible improvement.

Later editions, such as 3rd edition and 3rd edition seems to have more flaws and less advantages.

In most cases: it is had to mix Player's Option based characters / rules with older rules.

[tauknight]

What are its advantages over normal AD&D and its weaknesses?

[TheElf]

In the blog you can see a story about one of the books. If you check some of the books, you see Combat and Tactics has grid based combat, and its battlemats can be realy bad. This concept survived into later editions.

But has some critical hits system, has system for multiple levels of specialization, has an improved system for weapon groups, etc. which was good.

Skills and Powers: Allows customization of race and class, which is good, but it depends too much on DM approval of created races. This helps you to make moredetailed characters, and if you don't abuse it and the approval by DM is still a requirement it can be somewhat solid. The skill system is better than in normal 2nd edition, and they modified ability scores. The Psionic system is improved. Yet, its rules about weapon speicalization are different from what they planned in Combat and Tactics, so it shows the typical D&D products: lacks of foresight. Some might say class and racial abilities of this system became feats in 3rd edition.

Spells and Magic: New customization options for magic users, spell points based systems, new system for casting spells, etc. lots of detail to magic.

As you see the advantages seems to be good, but they are still typical D&D products and for this reason they come at a costs, and some problems are already visible in them.

[tauknight]

How gritty/lethal is AD&D combat? And compared with adding combat options it becomes more lethal?

SR combat is much more lethal than d&d combat, which is good.

[TheElf]

Since options like Critical hits, weapon mastery, etc. increased potential damage output while kept hit points at same level it made the combat a bit deadlier. Effects of the critical hits also made combat a bit deadlier. But it wasn't that lethal in most cases.