What were the design goals of 2nd edition?

I was reading Mike Mearls most recent blog post. and he brought up a good point.

Mike Mearls said:

I'll always remember 2nd edition as a missed opportunity. I have no idea what sort of restrictions or goals the designers worked under. Was backward compatibility deemed the most important element? What did TSR's designers see as the game's goal?

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Looking back, I don't know. At the time most RPGs had developed far afield from D&D, and D&D was certainly looking long in the tooth to anyone who had a played just a few decent RPGs. The design really took no advantage of the developments in the RPG world at all.

I suspect that 2nd edition's primary goal might actually have been the one for which that every new edition of D&D got accused. It might have been "design a new game that will create better sales for D&D." Yes, they knew there were cries for a new edition, but they seemed to have ignored the things most of those cries were asking for.

What were the design goals the developers of 2nd edition were using?

They seemed to give more inforamtion to the players. Saving throws and to hit numbers were finally in the PHB instead of the DMG.

Crothian said:

They seemed to give more inforamtion to the players. Saving throws and to hit numbers were finally in the PHB instead of the DMG.

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But does that really seem like it was a design goal. Was it a conscious decision that was intentionally added to 2nd Edition D&D. "Give the players more information?"

I remembered David Cook had a foreword in the books. Maybe he stated his intentions over there?

"Make the game player-centric, as opposed to DM centric".

IN other words, release many player's option books, instead of the modules/game expansions that only the GMs would buy.

Clean up the game. This was a stated design goal in the foreward to the 2e PHB - to get rid of much of the gygaxian headaches in the early game. To make a plain set to work from. Also, Zeb mentioned in the same foreword that he had to fight his urge to add on - there seems to be a hint that one of the big goals was to release a game that was "Still D&D". SO I think one of the design goals was "Don't reinvent the wheel"

Another would be to make the game simpler, and more appealing for younger players. It definitely was an easier read for me (I really started playing with 2e, and I understood those books much better as a kid than I ever did the 1e games).

I think "opening things up" was another goal. Level limits on races were generally increased, and the game gave some more room for creating interesting characters (remember that the Player's Class supplement books were actually mentioned in the original 2e PHB - they were planned right from the start).

I also heard there was a goal to make a game just different enough so that they wouldn't have to pay Gygax royalties on future products. Not really a design goal, but still.

Also, a lot of the 2e PHB was reflecting the views of the time as presented in DRAGON magazine. While people give the 2e guys some flak for their "one true game" attitude presented in the books* , we should remember that this was the prevalent attitude in the pages of DRAGON at the time.

* I myself had a lot of problems with this playing 2e. I felt like we weren't playing the game "right" when our sessions devolved into combats with very little role-playing. I felt like we were playing the wrong game, and I spent a long time trying to steer the game towards the "Correct" way, even though everyone was having fun already.

2e is to 1e what the Holmes basic rules were to the original D&D game.

They wanted to make the game more accessible to a younger audience, include as core options "simulationist" rules like proficiecies, get rid of problematic elements like demons and monks and assassins, and sell the crap out of a new edition that was, in the mind of probably everyone involved, objectively better than its predecessor.

At the same time, they wanted to take advantage of the new affordability of color printing with some great plates and a two-color look that didn't reek of 10 years ago.

You see some familiar patterns in these things after a while.

The way I understand, it was largely to clean up, compile, and revise the 1e rules. Basically, get rid of the stuff that didn't work, add stuff from books like UA which worked, and change the rules to reflect how people were playing the game in general. At least, Cook's forward to the 2e PHB seems to indicate that.

Given the various 2e campaign settings and the material released for them compared in general to the editions before or since in that respect, I have to assume that they really chose to emphasize world-building and a massively increased level of detail and flavor text into the game. 1e never had the level that 2e had, and 3e seriously toned it down by comparison (with some exceptions) and 4e seems in my exposure to have continued that trend in 3e (see the virtually nonexistant flavor text in the 4e MM).

I adored that aspect of 2e. Seems like they had gobs of creative freedom to details the various campaign settings, and they created some amazingly inspiring material.

Orius said:

The way I understand, it was largely to clean up, compile, and revise the 1e rules. Basically, get rid of the stuff that didn't work, add stuff from books like UA which worked, and change the rules to reflect how people were playing the game in general. At least, Cook's forward to the 2e PHB seems to indicate that.

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This.

People don't seem to remember, but I do clearly, that at the time 2nd Edition was announced it was thought by TSR (or at least it was what they were stating) that the 1E game had become bloated. Just the number of hardbacks that had been published - which of course was NOTHING compared to what would be coming - was too much. People were trying to run games with a pile of hardcovers, dragon articles, and house rules. So, the biggest thing was indeed to recompile, revise, and update the rules to better reflect the way that the game was widely being played.

So, if most people were using a MUCH simplified form of initiative - that's what 2E would use. If they were avoiding constant lookups on the combat tables then 2E would replace the tables with the simpler THAC0 seen in the appendices of the 1E DMG. If people weren't playing Monks or Half-orcs 2E would drop them. Etc.

Their failure was that these were quite short-sighted intents. There wasn't a long-term plan or examination of the game as a whole to see if there weren't a better way to go about anything, much less everything. So we got THAC0 instead of a Base Attack Bonus. Saving throws were still arbitrarily arranged and remained unadjusted by even a whit. Spells were altered a little bit here and there but none of the confusing descriptions were actually rewritten. Perhaps the greatest loss was the written tone throughout the game was changed from Gygax writing to his PEERS to one of a company explaining the game to KIDS. It made it nigh-impossible to respect the improvements that were made.