It is sad how the Second Edition died. With TSR bankrupt, the game took on a tarnish from the mismanagement of the 1990s, as AD&D itself was blamed for the downfall. The game did not deserve to die and end like this. Wizards' buying TSR and releasing 3E as a complete rewrite reenergized players, but it left a stain on 2E's legacy, as if it were a failure.
And we have not had a stable edition from Wizards since. They replaced the 3rd Edition like they replaced the 4th, and now the 5th Edition is in its endgame phase. D&D 4 Essentials came out to "clarify the rules" and "not replace the original," and we see the same thing with 5.5E.
I wish we lived in an alternate timeline where TSR never went away, and we were back on the original set of rules that started this all. Constantly changing the underlying system of how D&D works is getting tiring, and I just want the game to play how it felt back in the good days. While a lot of the concepts are the same, characters and the damage scales have been constantly tinkered with over the last 25 years of Wizards' ownership, and nothing from 3E to 5E uses the exact scaling anymore.
The First and Second editions are the original game, and essentially the same set of rules, and are compatible. 1E and 2E are classic games, like Monopoly, and they should be seen the same way. There are times when I wish Wizards would stop releasing new editions of the game and support and preserve the ones they already have.
And not rewrite, but preserve and honor.
These days, it feels too much to ask, so I am over here in the OSR enjoying the games as they were.
Second Edition is like the 5.5E of today, if 2014 5E was the First Edition. Both games were "changed due to outside societal pressure" to be more "mainstream product." Both may bankrupt the company. The Second Edition introduced significant numerical changes that improved the game, and we still had some great game designers working on the rules.
While a lot was removed due to outside pressure in 2E, it all found its way back into the game, even demons and devils. With 2024 D&D, half-elves and many other choices were removed from the game, and all humanoids were removed from the monster lists. None of the removed content from 2024 D&D is likely to ever return to the game due to the zeitgeist of social media pressure.
The ideological crusade that forced the removal of content from 2E was an outside force, and the designers found a way to bring it all back. The ideological crusade that created 5.5E came from within the company, and we are never going to get these things back.
I fault 2E for its failings, for being too commercial and mainstream, such as dumping assassins, half-orcs, and demons. Demons return in the Outer Planes Appendix, and the Assassin returned in the Complete Thief book. Half-orcs return in the Complete Book of Humanoids. So, all the cut content was eventually restored; it was just well hidden and took a few years to be published and released.
The main books of AD&D 2E remained a mass-market game to avoid controversy.
They kept the game essentially the same as AD&D 1E, and just cleaned up the rules and organization. The more I study D&D 3.0 and 3.5E, the more I see them as inferior to the two originals. I wish Wizards kept its games in eternal print, not changing them, but just keeping every edition of the game available to buy, even in print form. POD is halfway there, but many titles are still not available, and the 1E books have scanning errors.
Still, this was the version of the game that got us back into D&D. We loved the removal of XP for gold pieces, and the story XP system with the higher encounter XP made us fall in love again. The game wasn't about greed anymore; this was about stories and epic tales of heroism. The game wasn't any less deadly either, although progression seemed faster due to the higher rate of XP for encounters.
The tone of the game shifted from gritty swords & sorcery to heroic high fantasy.
Removing demons and devils improved our game. As a DM, I needed to come up with evil factions, use other monsters, highlight evil dragons and their cults, put the yaun-ti front and center, focus on the drow, and use the monster book in creative ways. We never had them as a part of our Forgotten Realms campaign, and the game was better for it.
That is not to say I did not miss them, as ultimate bad guys, they were missed. They more thematically belonged in Greyhawk and other settings, back when 1E featured them prominently, and they did make appearances by the time the Outer Planes Appendix came around. Still, having the first run of the Realms as a "no demons place" made it feel special, like the gods actually worked for a living and kept them out, and other evils had to step up and take on the roles of corrupters and wicked masterminds.
This is why I love For Gold & Glory. It is a clean-room Second Edition game that works as the engine for any Second Edition book or adventure. People can write for this game, and it works with any First Edition book. It is nice to see a version of the game that does not get much love receive attention and support. This is also setting agnostic, and it feels more thematically medieval and grounded than much of the Forgotten Realms books and 2E source material.
It is a fantastic game, authentically medieval, storytelling, and compatible with anything in 2E and 1E. This feels like home to me. The classes are not overpowered and bloated, and you need to rely on gear, teamwork, and smarts to make it by. While the product identity monsters and spells are stripped out, they are easily added back in, or left out if you want to play in original worlds.
Where other games feel too simplified, like Old School Essentials, and other games feel unnecessarily flashy and wild, such as Dungeon Crawl Classics, FG&G hits the Second Edition notes and feels perfect. This is still 1E, but with many quality-of-life improvements. The non-human level limit caps were significantly raised, too, bringing about a better parity and fairness to the other character races.
FG&G is also an open game, and people can write material and adventures for this version. We can't do that for AD&D 2E. I always support the community-supported game that allows for the most freedom.
I get why First Edition takes most of the attention. This is the original game. People look at the Second Edition and see something that Gary Gygax did not work on; it had censorship issues, and it was the edition of the game that bankrupted TSR. When it comes down to it, there are only very minor differences between them, and both editions are cross-compatible.
I love the tone of Second Edition shifting to heroic high fantasy, and the feeling that this was the "game of the novels." The 1990s novels were very popular escapist entertainment. They perfectly captured the freewheeling adventure of those novels, where heroes went from place to place, swinging swords and casting spells, saving the day, and making daring escapes. While the First Edition could do that, the Second Edition was built to provide that experience, primarily through changes to XP, which shaped the nature of play and the flow of the game.
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