Blaming Second Edition

A Comedy of Errors.

My apologies for the glare on that photo. Granted, this is not all the Second Edition Material I own. At one time, I owned all the box sets you see save for Dark Sun which is underneath Mark of Amber and the Dungeon Master’s Guide. I had lost them in my move but, thanks to print on demand, I got them all back…sorta.

Look at that artwork though! That cover art and the artwork inside is nothing short of amazing. It’s rich, colorful, color contrast and composition are absolutely great. The pieces you see are evocative, they inspire the imagination to come up with interesting scenarios. You either want to play it or run it.

At least, I did.

Where I’m from you had to do this in secret. Either the parents couldn’t know or you had to find someone with parents who were cool enough to tell your folks if they called, “Yeah they’re just sitting around a table playing a game” and never specifying what that game is.

If word got out, it wasn’t just random bullying, though that was included. It was actual physical assaults if you didn’t stop when commanded to stop. Some got it worse than others.

The novels never interested me until the last couple of years. Until then, I never read any.

I do remember going to my girlfriend’s house during my junior year of high school. Her dad, whom I’d known for about a few months was sitting in his recliner reading one of the R.A. Salvatore Drizzt novels. Christmas shopping for him was easy. As long as it had Forgotten Realms on it and it was written by Salvatore, he’d read it. That’s what we got him.

Do you know he never made the connection between what he was reading and the game? He protested vocally when I brought the Player’s Handbook and Monster Manual into his home. He reacted as though I’d opened up a portal in his house right in front of him. I was the one that had to show him the link between what he was reading and what I was playing.

Imagine my surprise when this crossed my feed…

The meme suffers from a couple of things. First, no, Second Edition people are not to blame in the slightest for the culture around 5th Edition. Not in any way, shape or form.

The claims that 2nd Edition is just novels, that’s not true either. In fact, if we’re going to cite Dragonlance in particular, the novels came from the game itself as Dragonlance started in 1st Edition, not 2nd. The entire point of Ravenloft, Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Dark Sun and even Mystara were meant to provide a setting in which to play around. Adventures in some ways have always been railroads, similar to watching WWE. The outcome was pre-determined. All roads led to the same thing. For the starting DM, this was a great way to see how an adventure worked but now to turn it into a long-term campaign in a huge open world, that’s where setting comes in.

The novels were successful but trying to say the novels promoted story over game play, well yes, they’re novels. You kinda read those front-to-back unless you’re reading Manga but I digress. They were advertisement in a sense for the game itself. In fact, 2nd Edition is far more crunchy in terms of rules than any edition before it at the Core Book Level. Even the Player’s Handbook alone was more rules-dense than it’s predecessor.

2nd Edition also had the demons and devils “removed” thereby sanitizing it in an attempt to ameliorate concerns that the Karens of the 80s and 90s had…to no effect whatsoever. Later on in another splatbook, they just re-added them.

While the novels were initially based in actual plays of the game itself, later on, they just became novels. The characters were made up at a moment’s notice. In the case of R.A. Salvatore, he recalled being asked to come up with a character and something else for the Forgotten Realms novels he was writing because upper management at TSR wanted a pitch and the one she had wouldn’t work. Sounds like dice were rolled to me, right?

These were the equivalent of a tie-in product akin to the Masters of The Universe, G.I. Joe, Transformers and ThunderCats cartoons were advertisement for the toys. In light of that logic, I guess we all just played the episodes we saw on TV right?

Wrong.

There were times we made multiverses with it all or just mixed up the toys to have weird battles with no point. We created entire games out of that stuff. The shows mattered because we wanted to watch them. Those of us fortunate enough to watch the Dungeons & Dragons Animated Series didn’t go into it thinking we were going to be Hank, Uni, Bobby, Shiela, Diana, Presto or Eric. We went into it thinking that we finally get to play Dungeons & Dragons. None of us DMing a game ever tried to put on the voice of the Character of Dungeon Master, we played the NPCs.

THAC0 was firmly in play at our tables. Travel took awhile. Dungeon Delves were still a part of this and it made for hours of fun with friends.

To equate the novels to shows like Critical Role is completely bogus. In fact, Japan didn’t get the Red Box until 1985. Record of Lodoss War was written as a series of articles for a magazine and this was based on actual plays of the Mentzer Red Box game but TSR wouldn’t allow an official release under the Official Brand, so Japan removed all of the trademarked stuff from it and published it anyway. It was later turned into an anime where you can see how the game progresses. Anyone who’s ever played Mentzer B/X will recognize it and be able to point it out to you.

I know where these arguments are coming from…ironically, these are the same people who recommended Record of Lodoss War to me and the reason I own a copy of it now. So, an anime as popular as Record of Lodoss War…why doesn’t that inspire people so heavily?

2nd Edition didn’t start the story over rules type of play. That’s also not true in the least. If anyone started that, it was players at their own tables and, remember kids, the internet was not yet in ubiquity.

The popularity of the novels among people who didn’t play, is completely beside the point. They did not play and they’d swear upon a stack of King James Version Bibles to their parents and peers that they’ve never played if the link between the novels and the games were ever established.

Some loved the novels and they still played but they played with a better understanding of the setting. They weren’t leveraging stupidity like bringing a character from the novel in with a different name and using the novel as a strategy guide, they were two completely different animals.

Not one of us ever woke up and thought that we’d just disregard the rules (and this is where this is coming from, Rules Attorneys On Retaner aka RAOR) because we’re not being puritanical in our approach to the rather voluminous tomes ad nauseum but because, what 2nd Edition did best was build out worlds for people to play in. The adventures were there to get some feet wet and then it was off to the races. While I had access to box sets and they did get played, they weren’t much on replayability. We were on our own after that. We didn’t try to ape the boxes or any adventures I may have been fortunate enough to have at the time (almost none at all) but we did have imagination enough to start our own settings and let them expand out organically.

When did that game occur? With my girlfriend and her family whom had since calmed down about the game and saw that I was right when I said it wasn’t this evil thing that would bring horrible Shadow People into their lives. We never played in the Forgotten Realms but my girlfriend’s dad did bring the pain to many a Goblin and Hobgoblin on several occasions. He came in with a knowledge of how a world like that would work. He did use tactics that some of the characters used and being a Vietnam Vet, he used military tactics as well.

There were always questions concerning rules and I’d have to look them up later and keep the game moving. Doesn’t mean we abandoned the rules…again. It means that we kept the game from getting bogged down as much as possible. When my PHB and Monstrous Manual got ripped to shreds during the night I got cornered, they replaced them for me. They didn’t have to. As soon as I was healed up enough, we went back to gaming.

Now, let’s fast forward to today. Blaming us for the woes of 5th Edition. No. Absolutely not and I roundly reject that the edition that some of us finally got access to is responsible for all the woes of the current Law Firm. None of us wanted this shit…

We weren’t the ones asking for pronoun nonsense or safety tools at the table. In fact, we were told to separate fantasy from reality. We removed players (thankfully those moments were far fewer and much farther between) when we realized they couldn’t or when they cheated and successes were not a given.

Is it fair to say that 2nd Edition core was watered down? Whatever, I guess if it makes you sleep so much better at night, fine, but you’re equating correlation with causation and it’s simply not true.

We didn’t create Critical Role. We didn’t license it. We didn’t care for it. In fact, the only thing that I’ll give you guys is that we cared for and loved this game so much, despite it’s flaws, not because of them, that we became excited when someone new sat down at a table and wanted to play with us. We were even more excited when they stayed. It was even better if they came armed with their own PHB and became interested enough in the game that they were an asset and not an asshole.

We were tolerant to a fault. Not as 2nd Edition players but as people who once loved that brand. We all fell into the trap of being tricked into unreasonable positions. All of us.

This sentiment doesn’t convey that, in fact, it operates under the assumption that a goose, flapping it’s wings and hissing scares someone like me. Plenty of geese have tried that tactic and they have not hindered my path once. I’m bigger than the goose and I am not above kicking it back if it doesn’t start beating webbed feet in the opposite direction or just leave me the hell alone.

In fact, the puritanism has now become antagonistic and I ask, when has that ever netted a positive for this game? Ever?

Would I like to see these extreme weirdos leave? Absolutely. Not one of them are welcome at my table but the unreasonable poking and needlessly antagonizing people isn’t going to help. Matter of fact, sooner or later the exilers will be outnumbered by the exiled and those who left because they didn’t want to be part of that and then what? When your brand needs saving, it’s not like you’re going to have people sympathetic to your plight. Look at how things are going now. Once those new books are released, it’s going to be Radiant Citadel all over again. Give it time.

It’s not exactly surprising. It’s been happening. It was only a matter of time until I failed yet another purity test.

This is why I’m done with the Official Brand. I can’t find players that one side or the other hasn’t radicalized to the point of being needlessly antagonistic and obnoxious.

I’ve also gotten sentiments that there are people who will take what I have and to that I have to say this. I’m not getting rid of them. I’m going to be using them to mine ideas for other games. I have fifty years of content I can mine…and convert. I can still play in Krynn using Castles & Crusades or Wasted Lands…hell, even OSE. I know that will be blasphemy to some but I’m just going to sit there being that heretic. Been one for thirty years or better, why should today be any different?

Still, after this, I’ve muted anything with D&D, DnD, etc in hashtags and I’ve also blocked Wizards of The Coast entirely. I want nothing to do with their products. I will not buy any more of their products in any way, shape or form and, if someone wants me to run a game from Official Brand, that’s going to happen only if I know the players personally and that means live and in person. We’re talking deep inner circle here and that circle will be kept small. I don’t have to vet that.

To close out, yes the next Cairn Battle Report is in the works. I’ll probably finish it tonight and get it out there.

Until then, why not read the Chronicle of Thrasamumd, a Germanic Vampire, from his first two entries

The Chronicles of Thrasamund pt 1

The Chronicles of Thrasamund pt 2

And check out my review on Thousand Year Old Vampire here.