... AD&D sucks ... BG would be better with 3.5 or 4.0...
What?
Did I just insult your childhood memories?
I love how this reaction comes up every time I point out the obvious.
And never a single argument against it. As there is none.
DnD in general is not that good. The only reason for its success is that it was pretty much the first plus less ridiculously complex than Rolemaster, for example, and also because by now it is so well known that other, better systems have a hard time just because of that.
DnD pre 3.5 is (I'm going with only few examples, but there are many more)
- horribly unbalanced (characters with less HP than a dog; classes becoming obsolete in late-game as some classes become overpowered, and the other way around in early game (and all of that is supposed to be "realistic".. lawl!)
- illogical (the way multiclassing works is just 100% arbitrary, there is no profound reason not to combine any class with any other - let the GM decide if a monk / druid makes sense, not the system ffs!; the same for the race/class combinations; wizards cannot hold a sword, because, uhm... allergy, I guess!)
- ridiculously unintuitive (different XP requirement per class; high number are generally a good thing (that is called intuition), but suddenly some values need to be negative to be good (and with armor no less, higher armor = lower number.. ookaaayy....; try putting 10 (PnP experienced) people in a room with the rules, give them 2 hours, then count the people that are able to explain THAC0. It will be less than 4)
- I do not know a single PnP player that did not play AD&D with house rules. That is no coincidence. It needs those to make any sense and be playable.
At the same time, I never needed house rules for Shadowrun, Mutants & Masterminds or The Dark Eye. I wonder why.
- Read this, it is a lot of fun.
Now the implementation of AD&D 2nd in the BG series has all the negative stuff, plus a lack of some good combat rules like grabbing, making fighter and rogue types even less interesting than they normalle are rule-wise.
How are you going to argue against all that?
Really, I'm curious. I can see no redeeming quality in this crap. And I hate that it ruins my BG for me.
I'm not talking about the setting, mind you. That is fine, and brought some cool stuff like Planescape.
But... a setting has almost nothing to do with a ruleset.
A ruleset is defined by its rules, that is what you need the book for.
A setting can be made up by any good game master, it is not what matters about a PnP system. Sure, it gives hints and guidelines, but that's about it.