dusting off the dice

[Hanoverfist]

Well its been twenty years or so and I am very rusty. Does anyone use thac0 and 2nd edition AD&D anymore?

[AMFV]

Yep. It's not all that prevalent though, you may have to start a group to find people who play it. Or organize one with your friends. The advantage is that the books are often still floating around in used book stores and you can get them on the cheap (since many are softcovers and are often in not great shape).

[Dimers]

There are five threads in the most recent fifty in this subforum right now. And 2nd-ed games fill up pretty quickly in the recruitment forum. I'd say there's a fresh recruitment going every few weeks on average.

Very few new players are turning to 2nd-ed, but there's still plenty of interest. I myself play in one 2nd-ed game in person.

[Knaight]

I wouldn't call 2nd edition proper that common, but that's at least in part due to a recent phenomenon called retroclones. Basically, the 3rd Edition Open Gaming License and the way copyright law works with game mechanics makes the copyrightable terminology of D&D almost entirely open (there's a couple of monsters that aren't), along with the uncopyrightable mechanics. So there are a ton of subtly different variations of early D&D out there, from the early Color-Box series to 2nd edition.

It's fairly common for these subtle variations to include dropping THAC0 and switching to a positive attack bonus and ascending AC, but the probabilities remain the same and it's not an adjustment the way 3e is because most everything else will be about the same. With that said, in 20 years you have missed a great deal. There's between 3 and 6 editions of D&D since depending on how they're counted, but I'd argue that the bigger and more interesting changes have been in the non-D&D world, which exploded with the advent of .pdf publishing, print on demand, etc. There's some seriously cool stuff that might be worth checking out, from the largely familiar and beautifully refined (you'd probably like Adventurer, Conquerer, King) to fascinating esoteric stuff totally unlike anything available 20 years ago (It's worth giving Microscope a spin just to see the breadth of the hobby).

[Lord Torath]

Dragonsfoot has a pretty healthy 2E community. There are still quite a lot of us out there. Check out the bulletin boards at your Friendly Local Game Store. There is also might be a Meet-Up somewhere in your area.