D&D And Me Volume 4: The 2nd Edition Stretch

 2nd Edition was around from 1989-2000, when 3.0 dropped.  An eleven year stretch, currently second only to 1e, 1977-89.  As I mentioned before, 2e was my jam in High School, seeing as it came out the year I started my Freshman year.  Fittingly, for my personality, I was the final class to be able to say they started High School in the 80s.  This was a very formative time for me as a gamer and as a person, my high school and first round of college years.  I got married during 2e's tenure, so one could say I literally grew up with 2nd Edition, and all these years later I still love it.  I have grown to appreciate other versions of D&D on their own merits, of course, but 2e is tied with Basic (BX or BECMI) as my favorite D&D.

  Now, 2nd Edition had a lot going for it.  Personally, I loved the original presentation of the Monstrous Compendium, in a big three-ringed binder full of monsters each of which had a full-page or more entry.  In practice, one needed a lot of those little hole reinforcement stickers to keep pages from coming out, but in theory one could add pages to their binder, like the Forgotten Realms and Kara-Tur packs I purchased.  Along with 2e came the brown leatherette splatbooks.  The Complete Fighter's Handbook, The Complete Wizard's Handbook, etc.  Books for Demi-Humans, books for setting-specific classes like Ninja and Shi'ar, books from the green historical line, like Rome, and Charlemagne's Paladins.

  THIS was 2e.  It went everywhere and did everything.  The Realms, Dragonlance, Al-Qadim, Maztica, Spelljammer, Planescape, even my favorite setting of all time, Mystara, got some 2e support.  And yeah, Ravenloft.  My other favorite setting.  It's no wonder we had such a blast with 2e, as there was so much of everything to inspire and inform our games.  Too much, from TSR's financial standpoint.  But that's not really what I wanted to talk about.

  To me, 2e was everything I had wanted in a Dungeons & Dragons game at the time.  The rules we often see as clunky in hindsight were fine for those of us who grew up with 1e and Basic.  In fact, they were a genuine improvement in many cases.  All the support materials were just icing on the cake- and a crap ton of icing it was.  But then something happened that really upset me, and to this day I'm only partially sure why.  2e got a facelift, and I hated it.

  The core books were reformatted and given a new trade dress in 1995.  Gone was the natural progression of cover design from the 1e redux to 2e, these new "black border" covers just felt... off.  And the interiors?  Ugh.  Gone was the iconic artwork of the original run of 2nd Edition, and the new layout went from the friendly blue and black to a more aggressive red and black.  The font styles changed to a less readable style, and on the whole made the entire corebook line look closer to what the later Ravenloft-themed stuff looked like.  It just felt... wrong.  Now, the art isn't bad, at all.  Both covers were done by the legendary Jeff Easley.  But the tone of the art was... different.

Now, I'll admit if someone jumped into AD&D at this point, they wouldn't have been so used to the previous presentation.  So this just might be my age and my prior D&D experiences predisposing me to dislike, nay, loathe the black-border redux.  But this wasn't all- the reprints of the splatbooks changed to a cheaper cover, no longer the faux leather of the original issues, the reprints felt less awesome and in hindsight, maybe a harbinger of TSR's financial woes.  To this day the only reason I own any of the black-border "2.5" books is because they have been given to me.  I have never bought one of my own accord, and at the time of this writing I feel I never will.

Why do these updates offend my sensibilities so?  You got me.  I mean, I have something I like in each and every edition of D&D.  Of this one I can say, well, it's 2e, and it includes any errata that had been compiled at that point.  But above and beyond that, I just really feel repelled by this incarnation of the game, and was doubly sad when the commemorative hardcovers were released using these versions of the book interiors.  Second Edition is blue and black, dammit, and if there's not the Elmore painting of the proud dragonslayers just inside the PHB, it's wrong.  Now that I'm looking at the covers and the interiors side-by-side for this article, I do see something I can put my finger on.  The first version looks bright, optimisitc, action-oriented.  The second looks dark, desperate, and gritty.  To be fair, Dungeons & Dragons can be both, sometimes in the same campaign, or the same adventure.  But flip to the interiors, and that theme persists.  The art and interior design of 2.5 is more subdued, and made harsher by the red chapter and section titles and borders.

So, even as 2nd Edition waned, and Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR, and I finished my AA and ended up unable to pursue my Army career due to Obstructive Sleep Apnea, I still clung to my high school version of AD&D 2e in what might have been my first expression of unreasonably hostile grognard-ism.  I can say that at age 45 I realize I am being unreasonably judgey about what is essentially a cleanup and re-release of one of my favorite versions of D&D.  There's nothing rules-wise wrong with it.  But the look?  The feel?  All kinds of wrong.  At least to me.

2nd Edition's tenure brought me so many things I love about D&D, though.  I read the 2e splatbooks for fun, they had so many great ideas that were executed with more or less effectiveness.  The Priest book even had some kits that were explicitly less powerful than the average Cleric, which I found neat.  I mean, not everyone is a hammer-wielding, heal-casting badass.  Kits allowed some great fluff and options to keep the base classes from feeling samey.  And the settings - holy crap the settings.  SO MANY SETTINGS.  My favorites to read were Ravenloft, Maztica, and Al-Qadim.  Sad thing is, I've only ever met one other hardcore Al-Qadim fan, and none who liked Maztica.  So Ravenloft is all I've ever gotten to really run.

Here's a problem with my burning out on 2e due to my prejudice against the 2.5-themed products.  I missed out on some truly cool stuff.  Decades later, in 2019, I discovered Jakandor.  This mini-setting flew under my radar as I was abstaining from buying stuff with that 2.5 look.  It was an attempt to turn some AD&D tropes on their head, and it succeeded.  I devoured it as part of a web project I was involved in (that crashed and burned) and discovered that I had really missed out on a cool bit of D&D history.  I've looked back to see if I missed anything else cool.

When I met my wife in 1997, we weren't playing AD&D, we introduced her to tabletop roleplaying with West End's Star Wars.  She wouldn't make a D&D character until 3.0 was a brand new thing in 2000.  So that sort of sums up the end of my 2nd Edition Stretch.  It was, and remains, a favorite of mine, though I am struggling with my blind spot for its closing years.