Tuesday, October 18, 2022

Affection for Second Edition

Since its inception, the focus of this blog has been on the first decade of the hobby of roleplaying – 1974-1984 or thereabouts, though I have regularly strayed outside this arbitrary period of time when the mood struck me. I did this because I felt this was the most interesting era of the hobby and also because the latter half of that decade was the period of my own introduction to it. Obviously, I continued to roleplay after 1984, but I long had the impression that most of my regular readers came here out of interest in the Golden Age of Dungeons & Dragons and other early RPGs.

On those occasions when I have wandered outside the confines of that seminal first decade, I've noticed much more interest than I would have expected. This is particularly the case with posts relating, even tangentially, to the Second Edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. There is a marked increase in the pageviews and comments on posts about 2e, so much so that it frankly surprised me. There is, for example, much more interest even in posts gentling mocking the art of Second Edition than there typically is of my Pulp Fantasy Library entries. 

My surprise at this is entirely the result of my own myopia. Though I played 2e and even enjoyed doing so, it's never been My Edition. Likewise, when I finally abandoned playing Dungeons & Dragons in any form, it was during the Second Edition era, which probably clouds my judgment of it and its relative popularity. I've said before that, on reflection, I don't bear any ill will toward 2e and, in fact, don't think it's nearly as bad as its reputation in some old school circles.

I now find myself wondering both how widespread is the nostalgia for Second Edition and whether or not its fans feel that they're judged unfairly by aficionados of earlier versions of D&D. Because I only interact with a small sub-set of the larger old school RPG fandom – and likely a peculiar one at that – I have no real sense of how beloved AD&D 2e might be in the wider world. I can only say that, based on the response to my few posts about it, there's clearly some affection for it among my readership and I find that fascinating.

So, Second Edition fans: what do you think? Is 2e treated like the redheaded stepchild of the old school world or is it widely celebrated? I'm very curious about this, since I don't interact often with people whose favorite version of D&D is Second Edition AD&D and I'd love to know more about its place in the pantheon of RPGs. Please, enlighten me.

52 comments:

  1. 2ed was the first complete D&D edition to be published translated in Brazil (the Black Box came before, for lvls 1 to 5). So naturally a lot of people here start playing with 2e and are fond of it, myself included

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  2. I have some affection for AD&D2 because it was the edition that was around when I was getting into the hobby, and I quite like the design of the core books, with the big colour plates and, yes, the blue linework elsewhere. That said, I've only played it twice, so it's not a nostalgia for actual play.

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  3. For a lot of us, 2e was the first "playable" version of AD&D. While 1e had a lot of *ahem* character, it also had a lot of idiosyncrasies, with overly complicated subsystems: unarmed combat, weapon speed factors, encumbrance.

    I suspect a majority, or at least a plurality, of 1e enthusiasts actually played a hybrid D&D/AD&D game, jettisoning a lot of the cruft that came out of 1e. With 2e that was less of an issue.

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    1. I agree. I prefer the 2E versions of both the ranger and the bard, but bringing assassins and monks over from 1E was not difficult either. The rules were close enough that mash-ups were easily doable.

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    2. I learned to play in a redbox/ie hybrid, but failed at dming. I learned to DM in 2e, where I could find stuff

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  4. The Pulp Fantasy series, while sometimes interesting just paraphrases a story we might have already read, or may prefer to read in entirety. Not much to discuss.
    Posts on 2e generally discuss the game in some way, more in tune with what most people here want to talk about or offer more to grab on to.

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    1. I can basically second that sentiment. I certainly hope the Pulp Fantasy series continues, as a few times it has resulted me in seeking out an old author I hadn't ever read before, but while I enjoy the articles there often isn't much to comment on. Any D&D article or really any RPG article is much more likely to inspire comments.

      As for AD&D 2e in particular, sure some of that is nostalgia for me. I got into the hobby in 1990, 2e was my edition. I pretty quickly back filled my collection with a fair selection of 1e products, but 2e was my go to RPG for most of the decade. The differences between 1e and 2e are pretty minimal (they certainly exist, but I've never found them to be a real barrier to using 1e products with the 2e core books). You'll get no argument from me that 2e definitely had its share of foibles and flaws, but to this day if I were going to run or play in an AD&D campaign, I'd want it to be 2e (or For Gold & Glory if we are talking retro clones).

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  5. I have mixed feelings about 2e.
    Mechanically, it's just cleaned up 1e.
    So much so that the majority of differences are irrelevant, in my opinion.
    (Ok, maybe not level caps or NWPs).

    The real issue with 2e can be summarized as:
    1. The DMG is really terribile, practically useless, the worst ever made for any edition of D&D.
    2. The way the game is framed, presented and the assumed gameplay, which are at odds with the game experience produced by mechanics.

    To put it briefly, it's a clarified but curiously hamstrung (no guidance at all on dungeon design, for example) version of 1e that you are encouraged to play as if it was... Dungeonworld.

    While I generally think that OSRIC makes for a better second edition, overall, there's a couple of things about the first run of 2e that I liked.
    That said, in the hands of an OSR/traditionalist DM it's not that bad, I've played it and I would play it again.

    I really, really, dislike the later version of second edition, the Player's Option books, the so called 2.5.
    While the first printing invited you to look out for min-maxers and power-players, the black-books were a feast for munchkins trying to break the system in any possible way.
    In my experience, most people that like "2.5" do not really like D&D

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    1. I object to the "cleaned up" notion. As a lover of 1e, I would not ever include the 2e changes. I feel they were orthogonal, ill-considered, and unbalancing---especially for the style of play I always enjoyed. So I don't agree with that labeling in th least.

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  6. Okay I will weigh in on 2e. First I will qualify my opinion as one who came to appreciate the edition rather recently. I started my participation in our hobby in 1977 with the LBBs of OD&D. Moving soon after into AD&D, adding content as it was published and playing a "mash-up" of ODD, whatever non-TSR stuff took our fancy and AD&D. Then moved on to CoC, Runequest and other RPGs. I purchased the PHB for 2e during its first print run, but set it aside and didn't take it up again until the OSR rekindled my interest in older RPGs.
    Having said all that by way of preamble, I will pronounce my verdict with decades of experience with numerous RPGs. I currently find AD&D 2e to be my favorite of the older and newer versions, including the OSR offerings. 2e is very much like AD&D with the bits left out the bits which never really worked. David Cook did an excellent job editing and in reworking AD&D and although I still read the Gygax books for the joy of his prose, Ifind 2e is a game more to my liking. It's a less edgy take on fantasy coming in the wake of the "panic", but one can add in the "devils and edgy stuff" if it amuses you to do so. 2e is clearly written and organized better than 1e. 2e embraced "options" and making the game one's own in a way that reminds me of the '70s era hobby. I could go on singing praises, but this reply is already too long. Hope it's been helpful.

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    1. I started with 1e in 1980 and agree 100% with your thoughts. It was cleaned up 1e and, frankly, a superior system (until the players option stuff came out).

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  7. My older brother started on 1st edition but he bought me the 2nd edition books, so that was my AD&D growing up. I DMed 2e from somewhere around 1992 to 2000, when I switched over to 3e. Throughout those early years, I only played the core rulebooks and my own home-brew stuff, so I never got into the Players Options books or even the class manuals (though my players picked up a few of those along the way). We had a lot of fun – but we never played Rules as Written.

    Now, 20+ years later and all of that time spent in 3e/3.5/Pathfinder, I've made a return to 2e. Over the last year I familiarized myself with OD&D, 1e, B/X, BECMI, and several of the OSR retroclones. And though I enjoy them all, I've settled on AD&D 2nd as my preferred edition because it's comfortable and spacious and it does everything I want out of D&D (and I can homebrew it anyway if it doesn't.)

    I've heard 2e described as 1e just more clearly organized, and to an extent I think that's largely fair, but not entirely. Zeb Cook actually removed a good amount of the discovery elements that Gygax hid away in the 1e DMG (for example the spell effect sections that aren't included in the PHB). That element of wonder and discovery as the players cast haste for the first time and age a year without knowing it's going to happen, or the Magic User's first wall of iron topples over because of how he cast it – that stuff I like to bring in to my games from 1e.

    Is 2e the red-headed stepchild of the old school world? I think it's more neglected than anything. Gold and Glory gets suggested plenty when people ask after retroclones to try, so I don't think it's loathed. Seeing as it isn't that different from 1e (just optional rules really), it doesn't feel like 3e, 4e, or 5e and thus some sort of existential threat. Well, unless you play Skills and Powers. Then, it's a different game of optional rules entirely.

    Still, the big thing about 2e I like isn't really the rules, as I see them as largely just variations/options for 1e. It's the sheer volume of material that TSR released for the settings. Forgotten Realms 2e is really cool. And of course there's Planescape, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Spelljammer, etc, etc. And there's Night Below, which is a really great box set, especially the glorious sandbox that is The Evils of Haranshire. And the From the Ashes campaign setting for Greyhawk. And the Monstrous Arcana books (Illithids and Sahuagin – I never had any truck with Eye Tyrants.)

    If I'm going to sit down to play AD&D, I can look up at my library and pull any volume down – 1e to 2e, and I know I can make it part of my game.

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  8. I grew up on 1e so it's my preferred edition. Nostalgia trumps all for me.

    That said, I find 1e has the passion of a DIY fanzine. In comparison, 2e feels vanilla, slick, corporate and without any POV.

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  9. These days I mostly play a homebrew that's closest to Basic D&D, but 2E was my first intro to the game, and the version I played the most growing up. In hindsight, we were pretty fast and loose with some of the rules, so our actual play was likely closer to Basic than we would have realized at the time. So most of my affection for it is likely nostalgia.

    That being said, two things I thought 2E did rather well: 1) The Monstrous Manual, and 2) Presenting D&D as a "generic rule set" separate from its rules that was highly customizable.

    On 1), it's a shame DiTerlizzi didn't get to do all of the Monstrous Manual art work as originally planned, because it remains my favorite official MM, despite some of the truly heinous art. All of the ecology and combat tactics and what not really fired the imagination for me. David McGrogan's (Monsters and Manuals) "Let's Read the 2E Monstrous Manual" thread is amazing.

    On 2), I think the plethora of very different campaign settings did a lot to widen the scope of what folks considered as viable for D&D. There was still a lot of implicit setting in the playable races, the default monsters, the equipment list, and so forth, but settings like Planescape, Dark Sun, and Spelljammer showed how you could depart pretty far from that and still be playing D&D.

    These days, I look to 2E material more for inspiration than for rules, but it'll always hold a special place as my first RPG.

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    1. When I ran my 2e one shot i used rules as written with no optional rules (profiencies etc) and was surprised how bx it was!

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  10. I started on B/X and AD&D1e about 1981, mostly as a player who didn't read the books much. I did DM a few times and I did read the books, but not in depth.

    It was in AD&D2 that I really learned D&D inside and out, especially after 1991. I ran several campaigns and got to liking it. I think it's more "neglected middle child" than "redheaded stepchild".

    My long-standing group eventually went heavily for 3e/3.5/Pathfinder, but I found myself drawn back to 2e even as 4e came out. I've since run 3 short campaigns in 2e between 2009 and 2015-- one to teach the game to my teenage son and his pals. I found it a lot easier to teach than 3e or 4e, and the combats seemed more smooth and less draggy. The rules and procedures came back to me easily.

    A second source of my liking for 2e may be that Birthright remains my favorite setting, one that's never been officially updated.

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  11. 2nd Ed is what I got introduced to d&d with functionally. I saw the 1st Ed stuff in grade school but didn't get to play it. Tsr was banging out supplements weekly for years during 2nd Ed. So I imagine there was a good sized fan base eating it up. I really like birthright. My buddies were into planescape. Dark sun made an appearance purely for the power gaming aspects with the local munchkins.

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  12. I think 2e does get the blunt end of the stick sometimes. I'm 43 and I grew up with 2e. A lot of guys I play with nowadays played 2e but started with earlier editions. In some cases I think guys my age just never went back. They either started playing 5w after a long break from 2e. Or they are playing with people that want to play older editions. I'm guessing we will get a 2e Rennasance soon. I know there's people out there playing it now. But it's definitely not as popular as the other games.

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  13. I have a lot of nostalgia for 2e, as it was the current edition when I was in my college years, and had the opportunity to actually play with other gamers consistently, rather than just read the books at home, like I did with 1e.

    There were poor business decisions made during this time period that ultimately led to the end of TSR, but setting aside financial viability, the sheer creative flood of this time period has never been equalled IMO. The creativity of the campaign settings that were created for 2e - Ravenloft, Spelljammer, Dark Sun, Planescape, Al-Qadim, etc. - still continue to inspire people today to play within those settings and create new material for them.

    There may have been an ugly trend in the adventure modules towards railroaded linear "stories", but if you just read the setting materials, TSR was flooding out a massive amount of highly diverse sandboxes to play in.

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  14. Until recently I was under the impression that the game I started playing in the late 70's, "AD&D" was 2nd edition. Your blog caused me to actually research and find that the 2nd edition books came out in '89, by which time I was done buying rule books. '

    I did buy the original rule books, and I had a copy of the "basic" rules too, but my tabletop experience was AD&D, and it remains dear to me.

    I have since learned some of the 3.0/3.5 and Pathfinder 1st edition rules from computer games. Recently some crpgs are using 5th edition rules and honestly I like all of them, but AD&D is still my favorite.

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  15. LIke many I suspect, we didn't really see B/X, 1e and 2e as distinct games (despite Gary's insistence) and played some kind of mashup of the 3 using whatever rules made the most sense to us, of which 2e was a great clean-up in many areas.

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  16. 2nd edition was the one I knew when I approached AD&D. It was 1989 and I learned English on it, as in Italy it was difficult to find the game, imagine having a translation. Well, That was the game,. together with Rolemaster of my teenage good. As I read in another comment, I skipped 3rd and 4th edition and came back to 2nd edition in 2013, then had an experience with 5th edition from 2015 until 2019 when I became exausted by the new wave of puritanism blowing from the US. I sold all the 5e core books (I imagined there would have been a new edition in 2024) and stated to play Forbidden Lands, Mork Borg...
    That said, if I had to go back to AD&D I would never play 1e, despite I bought the books in the past years, luckily before the Stranger Things fever. I find the writing of Gugax enjoyable but the whole edition limiting and quite confused compared to 2nd edition. What I really like of 1e are not the core books, but the modules of that era. Those make really the difference. If you want to find a decent adventure during the second edition time, you need to reference to Dungeon magazine. I think I said everything: 1e, good ideas, 2e same concepts but better streamlined. Bye.

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  17. The blue highlights reminded me of a text book.

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  18. Even though I have mixed feelings about it today, my nostalgia for 2e is downright immeasurable. I came into the hobby in the mid-to-late 90s, so while I started on the 1106 Classic D&D Game set, my friends and I moved over to AD&D 2e (the revised black-cover core books) as soon as we could find them and afford to buy them from Reader's World or Waldenbooks.

    I want to blame 2e for my having completely misunderstood how Classic D&D was supposed to work (XP for gold, mega dungeons, etc.). Certainly, a close reading of the text of the 2e PHB and DMG would implicate both in fiercely pushing trad play at the expense of old-school. But the truth of the matter is, old-school would never have made sense to me when I was a high schooler learning AD&D for the first time. My friends and I were all a bunch of Tolkien and Final Fantasy geeks who had simply never read any pulp sword & sorcery nor played any roguelikes.

    We were all-in on 2e: to this day, the artwork in those revised 2e manuals just is D&D to me. For example, when I think of a D&D mage, I think of the '95 PHB illustration first (with this picture and this one in second and third places respectively). And this is even accounting for the fact that I snagged a 1e PHB off of Ebay probably a matter of months after purchasing the only two 2e core books I would ever own (the PHB and the DMG). I had to get a 1e PHB (and a copy of OA) because we NEEDED monks, assassins, and ninjas in our games. Because Final Fantasy, you see.

    By the time 3e came out, my collection of AD&D rulebooks amounted to the 1e PHB, OA, the 2e PHB and DMG, a stack of Dragon issues, and the Core Rules & Expansion CD-ROM sets. Another guy in our group had the MM and the Complete Handbooks for Psionics, Elves, and Gnomes/Halflings. And so that was what we used. Unless we were in the mood for sci-fi, in which case we turned to yet another of our group who had (drumroll…) all the Alternity rulebooks!

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    1. (Minor correction, since it naturally slipped my mind. I owned two other rulebooks: The Complete Ninja's Handbook, naturally; and DMs Option: High Level Campaigns, which we fawned over but never used, hence its having slipped my mind. My friend who had the other rulebooks also owned a copy of Players Option: Spells & Magic, and we definitely used that for its extra specialist wizards, specialty priests, and most especially spell points.)

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  19. If told somefolks I'm running 1e, but I'm using B/X combat and I don't allow monks, assassins, or half orcs they would probably be fine but if I say I'm running 2e then I get a lecture.

    I ran a great campaign using just the 2e PHB and no splat books. I get the hesitation on what it became. But ran with just the PHB it is a great game.

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  20. As an addition to my previous post.
    I think that the main notions about AD&D's purported incoherence were born in the second edition era.
    With a DMG more interested in handing out xp for plot and role-playing, alignment change, and other matters instead of DM procedure, or the design and care of actual adventures, I think it heavily contributed to the birth of a generation of DMs (beware, not GMs, I'm specifically looking at D&D referees) as "movie directors", story-tellers, and entertainers.
    - which is not bad per se, but is not what D&D is about, or good at- and thus the big dissatisfaction with D&D grew.
    As further prof of this disconnection between rules as written (exploration game, well at least in origin) and intent (a storytelling game), just look at the host of plot-heavy adventures produced in the 90s.

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  21. I think the edition that was around when you got into the hobby plays a large part in its popularity. For me I got into gaming in 1983 at the age of 12 and stopped playing in 1989...only to get back into things in 2006 via the fledgling OSR...so I completely missed 2e.

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  22. We played a mash up of BX with classes and spells from 1e and when 2e came out we weren't going to buy something that we already had most of, so we spent our money on MERP and Battletech instead.

    I've only one 2e book the historical reference for the Celts.

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  23. I was a freshman in high school when 2nd edition came out. I had started playing D&D with the red box and played some AD&D with the older kids in my gaming circles. 2nd edition was well received by my group because we could level up from basic D&D and do it with a cleaned-up version of a game that frankly intimidated us a bit. But there was a lot of mocking and derision from older players who dismissed 2nd edition out of hand. There were local gaming clubs where these people hung out (I was lucky as a kid) and they made it sound like we were what was wrong with everything in D&D. We stopped playing out in public because the old guard could not resist drive by derision “oh look, the kids are playing their kiddy D&D” or other nonsense. We never really understood why people didn’t like 2nd edition. As a 14yo, 2nd edition became the foundation of our game playing; no more fracturing 1e and Red Box splitting the party. We all bought into 2nd and it served us well through college and beyond.

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  24. I was introduced to D&D with Mentzer's Red Box, but 2e was the version of D&D I played longer, from 1989 to 2001. We made a lot of use of the optional rules; in fact my players converted their BECMI characters to 2e and we kept playing our original campaign, ignoring WPs and NWPs (and the extra classes.) We also never used any of the later class splats, so the game never devolved into an arms' race. But when we adopted the Player's Options stuff, the campaign imploded; we liked the idea of options, but the execution was abysmal (and it was the reason we migrated to 3.0, which we saw as a cleaned-up and organised 2e+PO.) Our go-to setting was Dragonlance, but we had memorable campaigns in Birthright and Dark Sun as well (the two settings I love most from the 2e era.) Ravenloft and Planescape were also excellent diversions (we used them as accessories to whatever campaign we were running.)

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  25. I got into D&D in 1983 at the age of 11, and I've been playing off and on more or less ever since. When 2e came out, it filled me with a towering rage (same with Warhammer 40k 3rd edition) that only the young can have. I hated the slickness of it, I came to loath Forgotten Realms as a setting, I despised the 'splatbook' approach to the game. But now, 30-odd years later? Such things don't bother me. There will never be a final edition of any game, unless the game goes out of print. Now, I really don't care. D&D One? Who cares. I'll play what I want, you play what you want, and everybody will be happy. Or more likely people will complain about "X edition is destroying the game."

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  26. I just want to add, I know a fair number of players who love 2e, but hate 2.5. they all got the books for like Guide to wizards, and played them, and slowly learned to hate them, as each book added to the gumming up of the game. Every GM I know hated those add on books. same issues with pathfinder, and all the add on books, and of course, the fact the players only seemed to remember the pluses, and never the negatives...

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  27. 2e was a great edition. My favorite thing about it were the priests abd the spells in books like Tome of Magic, as well as wild magic, truename magic and especially Chronomancy (as per the amazing Chronomancer supplement.)

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  28. I'm not a fan of 2e, and perhaps I've come down too hard on it. Last year I ranked the editions thus:

    1. 1e (10/10)
    2. 3e/3.5e (8/10)
    3. 2e (7/10)
    4. 5e (4/10)
    5. 4e (1/10)

    THACO drove me nuts, as did the removal of demons and devils, and few other things. Objectively speaking, it wasn't a bad edition, but it was no prize either.

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    1. Hi Loren,
      You know that I have a lot of respect for your opinion, and I am always interested in your thinking. For this reason I am sure you will not be offended if I advise you to dig a bitore in the contents produced during the 2nd edition era. ThAC0 was not an invention of 2nd edition, it was already available during the late years of 1st edition. 2nd edition, as many recognise, opened the door to new rich opportunities. Today there is much more second edition that 1st in the heritage passed to new generations, because what survives from one edition to the other is not the ruleset but the settings and mood. Nowadays nobody is asking back ThAC0, level caps or the tables, but a new Birthright, Dark Sun, Planescape, Spell Jammer, Ravenloft, or the Old School feeling.

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    2. ThAC0 was not an invention of 2nd edition, it was already available during the late years of 1st edition.

      That's true. I stand corrected.

      2nd edition, as many recognise, opened the door to new rich opportunities

      I do acknowledge the great settings of the 2e period, especially Dark Sun (Athas). I think it's because I associate the 2e period with the railroady modules (which often had good settings admittedly) that leads me to come down harder on 2e than it deserves.

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  29. I liked 2E fine, with reservations. I liked the new and disparate settings available—most of the settings released previous to it were variations on a single theme for the most part (Greyhawk and the Wilderlands of Judges' Guild were largely similar, for example). It added a lot of interesting lore to the default assumptions—specifically, I liked how the Mind Flayers were expanded both in themselves and as part of settings like Spelljammer. There was a sincere attempt to adapt the central AD&D rules to various specific settings both historical-fantasy and fantastic. I didn't like the way that it ground all of the interesting but jagged edges off of the game, nor the way that it pandered to people who weren't even interested in buying the game (removing demons and devils, the assassin class, installing the assumption of Good-aligned play, and so on), though happily they moved away from those things, piece by piece and step by small step. I have mixed feelings about well-intentioned but poorly-executed aspects, such as the way it handled Clerics and "specialist Mages" or the idea of "Kits" to stand in for what would have generally been presented as a new subclass in earlier editions, but which quickly became essential for every character due to power creep.

    But then there's the late era of 2E, with its "Skills and Powers" options and so on. That stuff wasn't nearly as interesting, but of course by that time I'd already disclaimed D&D in general and was playing around with the White Wolf games and fascinating, focused games like Over the Edge and In Nomine, and not actually playing a lot of actual games if I'm being honest. That was also the era when Traveller was in a deep Imperium Games malaise, GURPS was beginning to overcome its initial lack of distinctive flavor (and Hero System was deliberately removing any flavor it might have been developing), and of course card games still ruled the land.

    Huh, I guess I digressed there. Oh, well, I'll leave it as it is. Maybe it'll be of interest to you or someone reading these comments.

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  30. First comment here, found your work about 3 months ago and I've been loving it, first off. You're my preferred insomnia reading!

    I got my start DMing in 2014, with 5e. When I started DMing, I desperately needed something--anything!--to interest me beyond the pretty-good-starter-set and the abysmal first adventure book.

    I hated fantasy growing up, you see. Sci-Fi was where my heart lay. Even after enjoying my time enough to want to DM with the conveniently-timed new edition, I still wasn't "in" fantasy. I think my distaste came from the post-Dragonlance flavor of 3rd-generation Tolkein knockoffs; it just seemed so played out and uninventive. I still groan at the Dragonlance covers in my PDF library.

    But...I've always been someone who turns an eye towards important history rather than new innovations, and 2E's settings were there for my burgeoning creative mind when that old impulse took hold. And what I found...my lord...

    Blasted dunes of silt, burning under a cyclopean red sun, where tyrannical overlords sat perched in precarious political alliances poaching the planet bare while jungle druids desperately worked to rejuvenate the parched soil! Evil realms of psychological torment, each tailored as a prison of sorts for their diabolical "masters" by forces even *they* couldn't comprehend! Cosmic dimensions of philosophy and spiritualism, each seeming to pose a question designed to cut at the heart of what your character STOOD for, mixed with at-times-violent civic politics (and, in my imagination, a splash of "Gangs of New York"-meets-"Casablanca")! A land straight out of Arabian Nights, with cultural specificity and detail on how to make it FEEL right and ways to structure campaigns both episodic and serialized. Strange, Star-Trek-Meets-Platonic-Astrology nonsense that seemed mythic and fresh and WEIRD in the wild-eyed, old-school pulp way I would grow to love. And, though I would be late to appreciate it, the meticulous detailing of how politicking and courtly intrigue can spur adventure as much as a bounty board or captured blacksmith's son.

    All of this came before the dungeon for me, before the archetypal ratcatchers and tomb-robbers. Without those gateways of imagination--all vibrantly creative, successful in their own goals, and luridly evocative in ways that modern corporate synergy just CAN'T be--I never would have hung around long enough to develop an interest in OSR play, or traditional fantasy/dungeoneering, and certainly not become a twice-a-week DM for nearly a dozen people. I have no nostalgia for 2E, or 1E, or any other edition; I just love that 2E's setting products, which I understand DID sink TSR at the time, took a guy fresh out of college and lit his imagination on fire with all the force and fury of Tsar Bomba.

    I've been running for 8 years now, and every time I introduce my 5e tables (populated with similar 20-to-30-somethings) to something from those 90's settings, it blows their minds just as hard. I did a whole Dark Sun conversion campaign that lasted 2 years, and I STILL have experienced players from that game telling me it's the best campaign they've ever played, from any DM. I'm sure part of that is me, but I find it hard not to believe a FAR LARGER part of that amazement is rooted in every deep lore drip I revealed from Dragon Kings, splash page of Brom art revealed over my DM screen, or considered detail from a setting that made sure it did the homework to portray a dying world that felt ALIVE. I take that as inspiration for my own setting work, and every game I run has the same singular focus and drive for detail those old books have.

    I'll always thank 2E for unchaining me from my preconceptions of what fantasy should be, and showing me what it COULD be.
    (And to tie it all together, I'll always thank my girlfriend for inducting me into the hobby when we were but college juniors; we just hit a decade together, and I owe all of the above TED talk to her!)

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  31. I'm not very concerned with oldschool, new school or whateverschool, but the best boxed sets ever during TSR's lifetime (Dark Sun, Spelljammer, Ravenloft, Planescape) were published in the 2e era.

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  32. 2e has some bad art, sure. But so does 1e. Anybody could put together a blog post showing all the bad art in 1e, so this seems like a weird point of contention even though it's what most people focus on in the 1e/2e edition war.

    As far as rules go the games are extremely similar, and in almost every area where the two differ the 2e rules are better (variable thief skill points, cleric spheres, unambiguous combat and timing rules). I would say that only the specialist wizard rules are really a dud. Both games are completely compatible, and 2e is the ONLY edition of D&D that really is a new "edition" of the same game in the normal sense of the word, and not a new game entirely.

    So yes, I like it a lot. I would definitely use a 2e player's handbook for an AD&D campaign, but I would still use a 1e DMG because it has a lot of resources that were never carried forward.

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  33. I wonder if the popularity is for 2nd edition in particular, or just D&D from the old days in general. Is it just popularity for 2nd edition art posts versus a pulp fantasy series, or popularity for anything to do with D&D from years gone by?

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  34. My personal feelings about 2E are that it greatly benefits from the divergent characteristics of 1. a cleaned up rules and presentation making it simpler and 2. the acceptance and promotion of the use of various options. 2E could be as simple or convoluted as one wanted. The acceptance that a group could use various options also encouraged (but not explicitly) the feeling that house rules were okay. It also went hand in hand with the vast array of settings. While it is easy to argue (correctly I would say) that the mechanics may not have encouraged particular types of game play, the openness to ideas definitely did.
    And coincidentally all of my most successful campaigns, both back in the day and during the era of the OSR, have been with 2E (despite my love of B/X).

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  35. I really don´t understand the hatred around 2e. I started playing around 92-93 with the core books but over the years our games expanded with the numerous class handbooks and the numerous campaign settings that I love to this day (Even not so popular ones like birthright and masque of the red death).

    The thing about the second edition is that it is HUGE, so you have excellent products and extremely bad ones (Diablo II box comes to mind), its easy to cherry pick horrible stuff.

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    1. I don't exactly hate 2e, but I WAS burning out on D&D at the time it came out and I was offended by the removal of the assassin (not that we ever actually had many assassin PCs...). I did buy some adventures, but was mostly turned off by the trend to railroads and meta-plot. I did buy into some of the settings, but have walked away from them all and sold almost all of my TSR D&D setting stuff (though I do still have the first Greyhawk boxed set and I have an incomplete Dark Sun boxed set). I actually sold most of my AD&D stuff in 1990 (other than the Players Handbook that didn't sell, and I decided I could keep in case I ever PLAYED D&D). In 2005 I re-acquired the 1e core books as I got into the OSR. But I never got any 2e core books. I may have picked up an options book or two, though I think most of what I actually picked up was a couple of the green settings books that matched the options books in cover style.

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    2. @Frank: I suspect that, when you say "options books", you're thinking of the various "Complete" books dedicated to various classes, along with a number of mostly DM-oriented books giving more depth to particular elements of the game, such as castles, ships and sailing, "humanoids", and so on. When a lot of us, and me in particular, talk about the "options books", we're talking about late-era 2E, with books like Player's Option: Skills & Powers or Player's Option: Combat & Tactics, which provided a large number of optional rules that greatly increased the complexity of the game, while many thought that they provided little real improvement to the game experience (and even detracted from it).

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    3. Ah, thanks for the distinction. I think by the time those were coming out, I was so not paying attention to D&D on the shelves. Yes, I was thinking of the Complete books. I might have had the Complete book for thieves/rogues.

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  36. The complete handbooks were a mixed bag, some were pretty good, others not so much.

    I hated the player´s option books back in the day, I wasn´t alone either most of my friends didn´t like them. I really don´t remember why, maybe I should give them another chance.

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  37. Whew, this is a lot to unpack. My first D&D experiences were with the orange spine books and BECMI, specifically the Expert set. This places it around 1983, so I would have been 8. However, I don't think that's when I actually came into the hobby. I think I was 11, which would have been 1986. I remember the Master box set, so that would have been 1985.
    Although that was the gateway, I consider 2e as my edition of D&D. It came out in 1989; I was older and actually had an established group by that time. This was also my first year of high school, so there was more accessibility because we could drive and summer jobs that provided cash for purchases.
    Is 2e old school? I would say yes, primarily because of backwards compatibility. As I understand it, Mr. Cook took the original hardcovers and cut them apart, rearranging and organizing them to arrive at 2e. Once you get to 3e, too much changes to run, say Queen of the Demonweb Puts on the fly. I'm not saying an experienced DM couldn't do it, but using 2e as a ruleset to understand that module works, whereas trying to use 3e to understand it is a much more daunting proposition.
    Also, I am speaking specifically to 2e, which I played and ran back then and have recently played a 2ish year campaign; I cannot speak to 2.5e.

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  38. I was born in 76, so 1st edition probably came before my time. Also, the 2nd edition cover art appeared on the Dungeons & Dragons ads in the comic books I read as a child, so I still associate it with the alluring game my crazy Christian parents wouldn't let me buy. As a result, 2nd edition still represents "classic" D&D in my mind.

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  39. I should come here more often. I miss things like this.

    I grew up with a box of inherited/stolen AD&D books. Two were the 2nd edition PHB and DMG along with the first edition books that I loved and found so full of flavour. I've played and run most versions of D&D except 4th and I do have a tremendous fondness for 2nd, or more realistically a blend of 1 and 2. It was cleaner, easier to understand and I loved the full page paintings in it. It does tend to get ragged on a bit if only because of THAC0 being so poorly explained.

    In my middle age, though, I gravitate towards older games and even D6 rather than 2nd, but it will always be a happy place for me.

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  40. For me, the shock, disbelief, and (shameful as it may be to admit) reflexive disdain that the recent rise in pro-2E sentiment online sparked can probably be best compared to witnessing the new generation of adults now expressing genuine, non-ironic nostalgic love for what I still think of as the "new" (20+ year old) Star Wars prequels. Like, surely this has to be a joke, right? History has spoken and these things are Stupid and Bad, right? Well, apparently not. I suppose I could scoff, but my own parents will almost certainly never share, or even understand, my lingering affection for things like Masters of the Universe or the golden age arcade cabinets or any form of D&D. So who am I to judge, really?

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