Is AD&D hard?

I'm starting up my AD&D 2nd edition Craglands campaign this month and have been working to prepare the players for both a play style and rule set that is foreign to them. Several of them have been dragging their feet on character creation and I had assumed this was just a mix of adulthood getting in the way of gaming and good old fashioned procrastination. But as I talked to some of them I learned that there was legitimate difficulty understanding the process. This led me to asking myself if AD&D Second Edition (henceforth I'll just say AD&D) was harder than I remembered.

I started playing AD&D way back in 1995, about half way through its lifespan. I was in middle school at the time although for years I had been attracted to that back corner of Walden Books that had row upon row of D&D books. Even at a very young age I was super engaged in the thoughts of wizards and warriors having epic showdowns with monsters and I could tell that somehow these books were the way to get there. 1995 was the year that the Introduction to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons boxed set was released and I was THE target audience. It was at the top of my Christmas list that year and once I unwrapped it I began studying the contents of the box in great detail over and over again. The story of my initial steps into TTRPGs is a story for another day but suffice to say that at the age of 12 I was all in on AD&D.

Are the rules for AD&D internally consistent? Absolutely not. Since I entered the hobby well after the switch from first to second edition, and with a significant amount of time before the days of d20 it was pretty much all I knew so I just accepted that the rules worked the way they did and didn't question it. Lower AC is better? Sure ok. Roll initiative on a d10? Why not? Exceptional strength? You bet I want my fighter to be exceptional. Doing some pre-algebra with THAC0 every time I roll to hit? That's just how its done.

In my early teens I spent countless hours pouring over the books and reading them again and again so that I could spend pretty much every weekend with my friends rolling dice until the wee hours of the morning in goofy adventures that were a mix of Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Conan, and whatever anime one of us was able to pick up at Suncoast Video. My point being that the rules to AD&D can't be that hard since by the age of 13 I had mastered them.

Or had I? 

30 years later as I start up a game of AD&D for a group that mostly has never played any TTRPG before the 2010s I'm starting to realize just how arcane the system can be. Partially because it's a goofy mess of artifacts from Gygax's system that was cobbled together from the wargames and crazy ideas that he and Arneson had in the 70s. These rules rarely had much internal consistency because as far as I've been able to gather a lot of it was made up on the fly during actual play. Eventually these rules took on a life of their own and combined Gygax's love of complexity with what seems to have been the opinion that the DM should have a semi-antagonistic relationship with the players. When Gygax was forced out and AD&D given a second edition it was absolutely an improvement (blasphemy to many but I'll talk more about that at length in another post) on the system but it was overburdened with sacred cows that TSR didn't want to get rid of. 

I find myself again pouring over the rulebooks although now with much less energy and free time that I did at 13 and frankly I have never mastered these rules. Not once in the 5 years of weekly AD&D play does it appear we ever did initiative right, which is interesting since there are 3 similar but distinct ways of determining it detailed in the Player's Handbook. I learned for the first time in 2025 that spell casters lost their dexterity bonus to AC while casting, and that you have to roll to hit with a touch spell against a friendly target that is engaged in combat. It seems like every page has a rule on it I missed. To be fair I'd like to think my ability to digest information is a bit better now than as a 13 year old (not sure that's true though) and I am using the superior presentation and editing of the For Gold and Glory rules as my primary point of reference. Regardless of all that AD&D is not the easy breezy system I remember.

All this to say that I'm cutting my players more slack than I initially wanted to. My gut was telling me that AD&D was an easier system to play than modern D&D, and certainly more than Pathfinder 2E. This might be true even but while the rules may not be more complex they absolutely are less intuitive.