Dragon and Dungeon Magazines - Do You Miss Them?

Treebore · Oct 4, 2012

I definitely miss Dungeon. Hopefully with 5E WOTC will also do something smart about Dungeon Mag, and make a Dragon mag that is worth reading too. In PRINT. Or at least a compiled ISSUE that can be downloaded as a PDF, that I buy each and every month, rather than be required to buy a subscription for a system I have no interest in.

If they actually win me back with 5E then I am more likely to be interested in a Dragon mag.

tomBitonti · Oct 4, 2012

I miss Dungeon, but not Dragon. I was still reading Dungeon, but had stopped reading Dragon a few years before print publication ceased.

I make up for now-a-days with the Pathfinder supplements: Adventure Path, Modules, and such. Plus lots of readable stuff for the 40K role playing games from FFG. (Although, sticking to mostly Canon seems to limit them, to a degree.)

I've gotten the new 4E compilations, but found the readability lacking.

Thx!

TomB

Quickleaf · Oct 4, 2012

I <3 printed Dungeon from Paizo. I didn't like the online only model, nor the un-collation of PDF articles (why do that, seriously?). And for a good while the content was shoddy. However, I recently had a chance to read thru the conversion of Roger Moore's "Baba Yaga's Dancing Hut" by Craig Campbell (@Shiv), and it was excellent. And the companion article on Baba Yaga was quite good too. Maybe Dungeon at least has turned a corner? Or perhaps there are just diamonds in the rough?

Olaf the Stout · Oct 4, 2012

Umbran said:
I am not angry or sad that they ended. Print media's tough these days, and I'd be more angry or sad if they'd damaged the business by pushing to keep print up when its time had passed.

I don't actually miss the magazines, in and of themselves. They were part of a dynamic of gaming that, for me, ended years before the magazines went out of print.

I don't know that there was a risk of that, at least while Paizo had the licence. WotC basically got a licensing fee and Paizo wore the risk of not making a profit.

Of course, pulling Dungeon and Dragon back in and making it part of D&D Insider made getting a subsciption to that more attractive, so there was value for them there. However, for me that value quickly left the building when I discovered that they would just be articles and adventures on the website, rather than compiled PDF issues. If they were going electronic with them I wanted a format just like the printed mags, but in PDF form, rather than hard copy.

Personally I miss Dungeon more than Dragon, but I miss both of them still. Part of it is that I have so many good memories of both magazines. The other part is that Dungeon was such awesome value, with 3 adventures for less than $10.

Quite often those adventures were packed full of more awesome than the longer and more expensive adventures that WotC were putting out, and that's without even considering the AP's. I would still be a subscriber to Dungeon now if it existed in print form, and I don't play 4E and have enough adventures to run for 10+ years. That's how much I loved Dungeon.

Olaf the Stout

Echohawk · Oct 4, 2012

Evenglare said:
I was alright when wizards was doing the compiled magazines...

Treebore said:
Or at least a compiled ISSUE that can be downloaded as a PDF...

Quickleaf said:
I didn't like the online only model, nor the un-collation of PDF articles...

Interestingly, for this month, WotC has decided to go back to the compiled PDF for each issue, and not publish individual articles. According to this news byte, this is an "experiment".

Dannyalcatraz · Oct 4, 2012

So, now that we're 5 years on, what do you think about Dragon and Dungeon magazine? Do you miss them? Are you still angry or sad that WotC canned them or is it just a changing of the times for you?

I have a Dragon collection starting in the low 40s, subscribed since the 1980s, and I own a few years worth of Dungeon as well.

Still miss them.

Still angry at WotC for not renewing the license.

Angrier still that they went to a purely digital format.

Li Shenron · Oct 4, 2012

I don't own any Dragon or Dungeon issue, but I've read a bunch of them before borrowed from fellow gamers. As a DM, I've always thought that Dungeon magazine was a great idea. It would just be so nice to get a magazine full of ideas in your mailbox every few month. For some reason, pdfs never got me at all, and even ideas from forums and website tend to be forgotten by me very quickly, for some reason I just need the printed form in front of me to get really into something.

delericho · Oct 4, 2012

Olaf the Stout said:
So, now that we're 5 years on, what do you think about Dragon and Dungeon magazine?

They were cancelled at the point where the quality was the highest I had ever seen it. (There may have been better times in the distant past, but those were before my time.) IMO, Paizo had hit on exactly the right mix of article types for Dragon, and their three-adventures-per-month format for Dungeon (and the mix of levels) was ideal.

(And, no, I don't consider the e-magazines to be a continuation, and never have. Had the iPad been available, and had they done them as an actual electronic magazine, that might have been different, but all they actually were was a bunch of web articles grouped under an increasingly-meaningless header.)

Do you miss them?

Yes. The Pathfinder Adventure Path books are excellent, but they're just not the same.

Are you still angry or sad that WotC canned them or is it just a changing of the times for you?

I was never angry at WotC for that decision. They owned the license, they were absolutely within their rights to take it back, to move them online, or to cancel them outright. And, indeed, it was good of them to extend the licenses so that "Savage Tide" could finish.

But I was disappointed that WotC took that decision, and moreso with the way it has actually turned out. But then, there were a lot of disappointments from WotC at about that time - the Dragonlance license, the end of the d20 license, the GSL, the 4e rollout, 4e itself...

Yora · Oct 4, 2012

I only got to actually get a look at them after they were finished.
And I have to say dispite the amount of material, there wasn't really much that I found useful in any way. But I'm kind of an obsessive homebrewer and have always been a strong proponent of PHB only, so it's probably quite likely that the format just isn't for me.
But I was exited to see articles about polearms and archery, but they both were just bland and not really saying anything new. Some monster articles I liked, like the one about daelkyr creations from Eberron. That one was really good.

Dungeon did a bit better for me, but the people at Paizo seem to strongly favor 17th century style fantasy while I am always looking for Bronze Age style stuff, so a great deal of adventures flew right out of the window because the premise just didn't work for my campaigns.

Umbran said:
I am not angry or sad that they ended. Print media's tough these days, and I'd be more angry or sad if they'd damaged the business by pushing to keep print up when its time had passed.

I don't actually miss the magazines, in and of themselves. They were part of a dynamic of gaming that, for me, ended years before the magazines went out of print.

I hate my desk, I love my couch. Things have made great leaps in the last years, but stuff is still too expensive for us to all do what Captain Picard did 20 years ago.

All the "ergonomic" advantages of print without any of the economical drawbacks.

Neonchameleon · Oct 4, 2012

Miss the single biggest source of broken crap for 3.X and the one "official" source that was thought too cheesy by the CharOp boards? Why no I don't miss print Dragon. Never actually bought print Dungeon so no I don't, but I believe it was better quality.