So, I discovered in a somewhat dumb way that it's not self-evident to everyone that D&D 5e is a LOT like D&D 2e. This surprises me, but hell, it's a fun topic, so let's go.

Caveat - I am not a super grognard. I never played chainmail. I was pretty young when the PHB & DMG hit the shelves, and I absolutely spent some time with the red & blue boxes stealing stuff from the "adult" books. 1e is the game I grew up into, so 2e was a big deal to me.

At that point in time, for me, playing D&D was a huge Frankenstein's monster of rules pulled from whatever sources we could get our hands on, most often Dragon Magazine. Best of Dragon #3 was book #5 in our priority stack.

(Sidebar: BOD 3 established the fine tradition of Machine Gun Archers which lives to this day)

So, 2E was a big change for me, but a welcome one. I very much appreciated that it was trying to streamline things and make them thematics. Bards as a class were fantastic! Skills were Awesome!

And when the "Complete" books showed up, I kind of loved them. At first, just because more class options (kits) were cool, but i came to appreciate some of the delivery of thematic elements through the rules.

I still remember the point when I realized that there was a swashbuckler kit for EVERY class. The idea that you could have a D&D party of musketeers was a revelation.

2e was also the golden age of D&D settings, and it's simplicity really seemed to drive that. Planescape, Dark Sun, Birthright - I DEVOURED these.

2e was also when I started branching out into other games. Nothing too fringey at first, but that was when I first seriously started looking to games outside the TSR sphere in more than a passing way.

Fast forward to 3e coming out. Like many people, this was a HUGE DEAL to me. We all have our stories of transition, but that's neither here nor there.

But from a design perspective, one of the interesting things is how much it standardized and modularized the game. Where 2e had been painted in broad stokes, 3e had a robust multiclassing system and easily swappable micro-rules (feats).

Hacking D&D was always a thing, but this changed the game (and changed it further with the OGL, but that's a whole other topic) in really neat, really engaging ways. But is also had some costs: fracturing and bloat.

4e came faster than 3 and it continued that trend of modularity even further. The whole game was now a well-constructed engine of small pieces. This also had tradeoffs - it was a lot of information to manage, and the pieces were sometimes less swappable than they appeared.

So when 5e came out, one of the design elements that was pretty interesting is that it's a lot *less* modular than 3 & 4. Classes were more essential, but the thematic elements we'd gotten in kits were now baked in as subclasses (an idea that had always existed, but had been odd)

This has a lot of neat upshots. It's VERY easy to turn a thematic dial in 5e by tweaking subclasses and races. In 3e, that same customization required a laundry list of explanations and qualifications. 4e promised this conceptually, but it didn't quite stick.

This also ran into the question of "What is D&D?" - 3e pushed the definitions REALLY far and 4e reeled them WAY back in. 5e came back towards the middle, which was the space that 2e started in.

This bit excites me, because that middle space was what allowed the setting explosion of 2e - settings that were wildly diverse, but still *felt* like D&D.

(BTW, No sleight to Eberron, which is brilliant and was *perfect* for 3e. It is the best kind of kitchen sink)

Similarly, this is not a sleight to Greyhawk, Dragonlance or the Known World. Each is magnificent in its own way. It's just that my heart is with the 2e boxes.

ANYWAY.

Some of this is analytical, much of it is subjective, and I'm ok with that. But the parallels between 2 and 5 shine so brightly to me that it's easy for me to forget that they may not be self-evident, so I figured I'd unpack a bit.

D&D will always be a conversation between the game it *is* and the game is *says* it is. There's a good case to be made that 2e's story is one of the strongest, and 5e feels like the game that delivers on that story.