2nd Edition: Dance with Death

Unlike previous editions, 2nd Edition focused on settings and characters, and continuity of characters. While it was, and still is, amusing and fun to have a D&D campaign with frequent mortality, (and I like it in Dungeon Crawl Classics) it's not so conducive to a lot of 2nd edtion games. There have been various house rules and official rules and optional rules to tamp down on the lethality of D&D, like the -10 hit points rule, or making death saves, but really all these rules are saying that we don't necessarily want characters to die when they're knocked down to 0 hit points. So why not just say that? There's an excellent aphorism "Don't call for a die roll unless you're willing to accept the result"
If a character is reduced to 0 hit points, they fall down and are no longer a participant in the combat unless they get healing. That character is not dead, but badly wounded and can be tended after the encounter ends.
So what about save or die? I'm not too concerned about effects like petrification, which is curable. I'm tempted to say that any instant death effects reduce the character to 0 hit points, and the aforementioned "fallen down" rule is still in effect.
That leaves disintegration. Well, my thought is to keep it rare. I still believe in having some monsters and abilities that are very dangerous, but not something for the characters to encounter in every adventure.

2nd Edition: Dragonlance

It's almost redundant to say that Dragonlance was both a megahit that rejuvenated TSR, and a point where Dungeons & Dragons made a turn away from it's previous tropes. Unlike modules like Keep on the Borderlands or Tomb of Horrors, the story was the focus of Dragonlance. Notably, this was around the time Bothered about Dungons and Dragons was putting pressure on TSR, and Dragonlance offered a setting that got away from the amoral gathering of treasure, the slaughtering of monsters, and the references to demons and devils. This asthetic would find their way into 2nd edtion as well. I'm not saying that Dragonlance was created in response to the criticisms against D&D, but it certainly was a convenient world for TSR to distance itself from those criticisms.

Unfortunatley, the original Dragonlance modules also removed a lot of the open ended gameplay. DL1 was certainly not a terrible module, but it was very linear. On re-reading my copy, I noted the use of the march of the Draconian army as a tool to herd the players to the ruins of Xak Tsaroth, and a pretty heavy hand in the resolution of the combat with the dragon Khisanth.

I lost interest in the Dragonlance modules after D3, Dragons of Hope. All the Dragonlance modules up to that point were pretty much similar in structure and play. There's a few interesting ideas, like the use of discrete events along with locations, or the politics of the refugee caravan, but these ideas, to me, were not fleshed out or used as well as they could have been. 

And then the novels came out. It was clear to me, even then, that Dragonlance was a much better series of novels than a series of modules. Later on, Dragonlance would get setting books that didn't tie into an overarching plot, and so become much more palatable as a game world. I think it's fair to say that Dragonlance was a kind of precursor to the settings that would come during 2nd Edition.