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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aaron L" data-source="post: 3320258" data-attributes="member: 926">2nd Edition was 1st Edition with the flavor stripped out.  It wasn't a new edition, it was a small revision of 1E.  It was pandering to those who called D&D satanic by the renaming of demons and devils, the removal of the Assassin class and half-orcs as a playable race, and the "Evil characters are discouraged" passage in the PHB.  It had the dumbing down of magic resistance rules and the mutilation of the Ranger class into the "Drizzt Do'Urden class". Yet at the same time as they stripped out the flavor, they piled unwieldy rules on top of the already disjointed core of 1E, giving us multiple conflicting systems for accomplishing the same tasks.  Just how many martial arts systems did 2E have?  We would get a system for something in one splat book, and get a completely new system for the same task in another, because the writers of the books were hired apparently without ever having read any of the other splatbooks.        The loads of contradictory splat books were written by seemingly random freelancers with little attempt at standardization of format between them, and an apparent lack of any kind of editorial management of power balance across them.  Thus we got the miserable Complete Fighter's Handbook and the equally dismal Thief's Handbook, the disjointed Priest's Handbook, and then the flavorful Paladin's Handbook and Bard's Handbook.Essentially they put the non-weapon proficiency system out of the Wilderness and Dungeoneers Survival Guides into the PHB, cut the DMG by 3/4, excised the Evil classes and races, ignored Unearthed Arcana except for Weapon Specialization, and marketed it as 2nd Edition so they wouldn't have to pay royalties to Gygax.  All of the changes of 2E except for the revamped monsters could have been implemented in a pamphlet.  The changes from 3E to 3.5 were slightly more extensive.  I started playing D&D with 2E and switched to 1E when I the group I played with said it was their preferred game.  I quickly found it to be a much more entertaining. There were a few good things, such as the customizable Thief skill progression, the increase of the ridiculously low racial level limits, the improvement of monster power (especially dragons and extraplanar creatures), and the Monstrous Manual presentation was excellent, but in all it came across to me as a rush job to repackage 1E in new books with a sweeping gloss of political correctness and superficial streamlining of the rules that didn't really improve anything.  The settings were the greatest saving grace of 2E.  But that's probably because there were so many of them some were bound to be good.</blockquote>

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