D&D and Me Vol. 3: AD&D Second Edition

 This is AD&D 2nd Edition as I prefer to remember it.  This glorious Jeff Easley cover, the iconic logo in blue, white and red.  The older TSR logo in black at the bottom of the cover.  Inside were pages with blue accents and titles, interspersed with color plates including the absolutely iconic Elmore piece "Dragonslayers and PROUD OF IT."

I remember being blown away by this book.  My previous D&D books were, by and large, saddle-stitched cardstock-covered BECMI books.  I had a couple of AD&D hardcovers, the orange spine prints, but inside those books were matte pages in black and white throughout.  The production values of the 1989 2nd Edition PHB were like nothing I had ever seen.  The book itself was gorgeous beyond belief.  It was easy to read, well-organized, and written in a comprehensible language.  The combat rules were now something the player could reference, and the to-hit mechanic was now mathematical, no charts or table needed.  To my teenage mind, it was a quantum leap forward in both ease of play and presentation.

These D&D and Me articles are as much about who I was and what I was doing at the moment in time I encountered each edition of D&D as they are D&D itself, because like music and popular culture we each imprint on things in varied ways due to the circumstances of our lives at that moment in time.  In 1989, the first time I held this amazing tome, I was beginning my freshman year of high school and stepping into a new world in more ways than just a new version of AD&D.  This was the final phase of childhood- where we wanted so desperately to grow up, to be adults, not knowing these years would be the last ones in our lives we could look back upon as carefree.  AD&D 2nd Edition would pair with BECMI as our go-to game, the spine of our group's roleplaying efforts, while branching off like a snake's ribcage was an explosion of other games we'd play for more or less time as we voraciously devoured everything.  Cyberpunk, GURPS, 2300 AD, Space: 1889, Paranoia, Twilight: 2000, RECON, The Morrow Project, Vampire: The Masquerade, Nightlife, and so many others.  Not to mention Battletech, which I'd started in 1986 at the lunch table and had increasingly captured the sci-fi part of my brain.

In '89 I was a fan of Information Society and the B-52s.  I wore combat boots a lot, but more because of JROTC than because I was proto-goth.  I mean, I did wear a lot of black, but if anything I was a holdover from synthpop.  As the 80s became the 90s, I never really left the 80s.  I was a cosplayer before cosplay was a word, and got quite a bit of shit over it.  I had several Star Trek and TNG uniforms, and alternated their wear with my Marine Corps JROTC uniform.  Above all, I was a gamer.  My weekends were spent gaming, invariably.  Overnights were almost always for gaming purposes. 

We fell, in many ways, prey to that terrible malady that makes gamers think basic D&D is the kiddo version of the game.  Now, in my forties, I know that B/X or BECMI is a fine way to spend gaming time, and just as worthy as any other version of the game.  I love OSR products like Swords & Wizardry and Labyrinth Lord, but in '89 only a subset of my friends wanted to keep playing basic.  AD&D was where the big kids played.  And so I kept my BECMI campaign going with Bill, Chris and Dave and played AD&D with everyone else.

Second Edition brought many great things to the table- like making the Non-Weapon Proficiency system we saw in supplemental books a part of the PHB.  Now it was expected that characters would have "skills" outside their class abilities.  Magic was cleaned up and organized, and more than just Illusionists possible as specialty casters became a regular feature.  We lamented the loss of the Assassin, Monk and Half-Orc... and demons... but having been on the front lines of the Satanic Panic myself, defending the hobby at my church, I really couldn't argue with that decision at the time.  Initiative was not such a mess it would eventually generate a pages-long description of how it actually worked on the internet.  AD&D had come of age as far as being a polished product for presentation to the masses.

The Monstrous Compendium was a glorious idea that didn't *quite* work as intended.  The massive 3-ringed binder of monsters was an incredible resource of information.  No monster had the tiny entries the original Monster Manual mostly contained, each monster was distinct and colorful.  Ecology and background, full-color illustrations, all in a package that allowed MORE monsters to be added later, or the DM to re-organize the pages for monsters they used more often.  Much like my beloved copy of Battletech Technical Readout 3025, I pored over this volume for hours at a time just soaking up information and background.

The Dungeon Master's Guide was initally a letdown in that we could all see it was so much thinner a volume than the original.  Many things from the OG DMG were missing.  In hindsight, I realize that combat was moved largely to the PHB, and things like artifacts moved to their own book.  The advice was solid, and the article on how to create classes from scratch locked me into several afternoons of building custom classes for game worlds I created that never got played.  The improved organization of the DMG made up for the changed content, and the content that was there was first rate.

So, I loved the actual books.  Let's talk about support.  I was reading Dragon Magazine monthly at this point- Hasting's carried it, and I could walk there from home.  This period was my personal Golden Age of Dragon Magazine, and I often re-read those issues thanks to the Dragon Magazine Archive CDs.  But it wasn't just Dragon- there were splatbooks.  Holy crap were there splatbooks.  The leatherette sourcebooks flowed, with everything from class guides to equipment to castles to a series on historical periods.  Again, when I need to center, and find my happy place, it is often one of these books that finds its way into my hands.  I have a spare copy of the Arms & Equipment Guide in my bedroom bookshelf for just such emergencies.  These books were invariably fun to read, but had mixed utility.  Some of the Complete books were not balanced well against others, and resulted in differing levels of character abilities when mixed and matched.  Thing was, we were teenagers and didn't let that stop us.  The Cleric splat is often pointed to as the "weak" one, with most kits depowering the Cleric in one area or another.  But our group moved from monty haul to story building pretty quickly- so this wasn't that big an issue.

2nd Edition seemed to lend itself to the transition the industry seemed to be undergoing from hack-and-slash to storygaming.  I6 - Ravenloft and the Dragonlance series started to place story ahead of combat, and 2nd Edition seems to have embraced that in a big way.  Experience Points were now coming from (potentially) class-specific actions and goal achievement, not simply gold pieces looted.  Roleplay was encouraged from the get-go right down to the explanation of how to use the Ability Scores to ascertain a personality for the sample character, Rath.

We also got game settings.  LOTS of them.  Grayhawk and Forgotten Realms, of course.  But Ravenloft became a Domain of Dread, not just a castle in Barovia.  Birthright, Dark Sun, Spelljammer, Maztica, Al-Qadim, and even an attempt to bring The Known World into AD&D as Mystara.  So. Many. Worlds.  So many, in fact, that it created a product glut according to some game historians.  But the main idea was that this period in AD&D history was full of creation and imagination.  It brought TSR low, sadly, but what a glorious ride.

Whereas BECMI brought me into the hobby, and AD&D gave me an idea of what detail and crunch could be, AD&D 2nd Edition hit me at a particularly formative age.  I was figuring out who I was during this period as most of us do in High School.  It became part of my identity, to the point that my first tattoo was the ampersand used in the BECMI and 2e logos.  Much of the music I still listen to, TV shows I still return to, the world I dearly miss- all of this was peaking when AD&D 2e came out.  And just as, for me, popular culture declined after this point to something I no longer identify with, so, too did TSR and AD&D.  When 2E was reprinted in the "Black Border" editions in the mid-late 1990s, I was no longer grooving to what the world was, what popular music was, or popular culture.  To this day, while I collect roleplaying games of all kinds, I skip the black border editions at Half Price Books in favor of another copy of the earlier covers.  I was really pissed that the commemorative reprints were the later printings, with the changes in trade dress and artwork.  But that's me, I'm a grognard for the 80s, and time marches on.

Still, when I see the sea green banded character sheets from this edition, or a brown or green leatherette splat book, or one of the many adventures and supplements from this time period- especially Ravenloft- I get homesick for AD&D 2e.  A lot of my high school experience was this game, and these books, and these worlds.  That's D&D and Me for AD&D Second Edition.