Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition vs The Lost March

Compare Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition and The Lost March side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, and more.

	Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition	The Lost March
Genre	Fantasy	Fantasy
Tags	Character Building, Classic Fantasy, Crunchy, Descending AC, Dungeon Crawl, Random Tables, Tactical, Vancian Casting	Classic Fantasy, Sandbox, Exploration, Hexcrawl, Dungeon Crawl, Faction Play, Domain Management, Random Character Creation, Vancian Casting, Inventory Management
Core Mechanic	Roll 1d20 to attack and meet or exceed THAC0 minus the target’s descending Armor Class. Ability and proficiency checks roll a d20 against an appropriate score. Spellcasters choose spells to memorize before casting.	A skill check rolls a pool of d6s equal to the skill level: one to five dice, plus a die for some class bonuses. Normally a 6 is a success and a 5 is a partial success. An Ability adjustment either widens the success range or adds a critical-failure range on the lowest faces. Settlement, wilderness and combat checks are opposed by the referee's dice, where equal results cancel and a partial success downgrades a full one. In combat, successes and partial successes are assigned to attack or defend. A hit deals the weapon's maximum damage on a success or its minimum on a partial success.
Dice	d20	d6 dice pool
Complexity	High	Low
Availability	Paid	Free core rules
Runnability	4 of 5 book tools	4 of 5 book tools
License	All Rights Reserved	Proprietary
Third-Party Publishing	Not yet researched	No verified route found
Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing.
Publisher	TSR, Inc.	Fausto Botta
Year	1995	2025
Languages	English	English
Best For	Groups who want referee-led fantasy campaigns with class-and-level characters, prepared spells, optional proficiencies, and detailed combat procedures.	Groups who want a long old-school sandbox campaign that turns treasure into faction rank, training and eventually conquered land.
Highlights	THAC0 expresses attack chances as a single target-number calculation against descending Armor Class. Parallel PHB and DMG organization and a DMG index covering both books make rules topics easier to locate. Optional proficiencies add chosen weapon and nonweapon capabilities to class-based characters.	There are no hit points: wounds lower Ability scores directly, so an injured character can carry less treasure home. The lawful factions sell ranks and months of training for gold, so treasure replaces experience as the advancement currency. Each exploration turn, the referee secretly rolls hazard dice sized by difficulty (1d6 on plains, 3d6 in swamps), and each 5 or 6 adds a complication or an encounter.
Considerations	Core rules remain split between the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master Guide, including DM-only procedures. Descending Armor Class, initiative modifiers, and special combat procedures require reference beyond a basic d20 roll. Optional proficiency rules increase character choices and exception handling.	Dice resolve only a set of defined checks, so players usually get past traps and puzzles by describing what their characters do rather than by rolling a skill. Wounds normally heal at one Ability point per day of rest, and ten or more days of healing cost a month of training. Characters begin as agents of a supremacist colonial reconquest, a premise the book states openly and asks the referee to expose through play.