Let's read the entire run

In the words of Charlie Chan: "Thank you, so much."

Well, I made it, at long last. So the big question I'm sure you're wondering is what I'm going to do next. While I could continue straight on with the electronic issues, I am loath to do so, simply because I've been so busy doing this over the past 6 years that I haven't actually got the chance to play 4e, so I don't feel I'd be a proper judge of it yet. Plus whatever the quality of the 4e issues, I do know that the page count does decline dramatically over them, so I would catch up with the present all too quickly.

Instead, I have a different target in mind. While complete collections of Dragon and Dungeon are easily found on the internet if you know how to look, this still is not the case for Polyhedron. And as easily the largest source of official D&D material that's still obscure to most people, I'm very curious about it, and would like to know more.

So here's the deal. If I can assemble a complete collection of Polyhedron Newszine, preferably physical, I'll return for another epic pass through history, starting with Polyhedron, interleaving Polyhedron and Dungeon where they run concurrently, finishing the physical issues of Dungeon, and then continuing with both halves of the DDI, at least up to the point where they went on hiatus at the end of last year, maybe more if there's another good cutoff point by the time I get that far. Any help you can offer with this would be much appreciated. Message me here, or at dimerous@hotmail.com. So this is not goodbye, but merely see you around. Until the next adventure. :salutes:

(un)reason said:

The ecology of the Tarrasque: ...Ed Greenwood shows up again to do the main part, with a cameo by Johnathan M Richard's association of monster hunters...They even have a footnote, although it's a bit half-hearted.

Click to expand...

Hey, I was allocated 550 words. I did what I could.

Seriously, though, thanks for 6 years of solid entertainment. It's been a blast reading along with your reviews.

Johnathan

Again thank you so much for this. Well done you sir.

Best of Dragon Magazine 1


part 1/6


72 pages. What? You honestly didn't think that after a performance as epic as this, I wouldn't have the energy for an encore? Think again! They did not just one, but five best of's between 1979 and 1986, back in the days when you couldn't just get back issues from the internet, so reprints actually mattered a good deal in helping new players to see the old material. And this gives me a chance to look back and see how my opinion has changed, several years and several tons of perspective later. What still holds up and deserves to be influential today, and what should have been forgotten, never to darken their printers again?

Since we're dealing with old school articles, it's instantly notable that they're a lot smaller than the ones we've got used too, cramming 39 into 68 pages. Paper costs were obviously a bigger proportion of their budget, since they put so much more effort into cramming as much info into the room they had, with smaller typefaces and less art. Looking back over my old reviews, I notice I had a good deal less to say about each article as well. Let's see if that's because there's simply less to say, or it was just lack of experience first time around.


Planes: Our first article is an excellent example of just how impenetrable Gary's prose could be. I know what the planes are, you know what the planes are, but trying to figure it out just from this article would be a far longer process than it should be for it's size. It has a particular obsession with magical weapons losing plusses as you move further away from their plane of origin, which is the kind of rule that just adds extra bookkeeping to the DM's job for the sole purpose of screwing over players. (especially since so many extraplanar monsters required certain numbers of plusses to hurt at all. ) While it may have been one of the first building blocks for the D&D cosmology, we're still a long way from a house that you can actually live in, and this bit of foundation isn't particularly exciting in itself.


How green was my Mutant: Ah yes, a good old-fashioned bit of random character generation. How I have missed ye. Both metamorphosis alpha and gamma world revelled in making your character as weird as possible, and this is one early example, letting you give your character a wide range of colours and body shapes. Curiously, it's pretty much system free, (although, logically, having different numbers of fingers and toes would make a real difference to your capabilities) so you can easily use it for other games. This one still seems both amusing and usable.


Some Ideas Missed in Metamorphosis Alpha: Jim Ward was full of cool ideas in the early days, but sometimes struggled with the mechanics, especially since he was one of the most prone to making overpowered stuff, and running monty haul campaigns. This article is a good example of that, as it provides errata for the items list, and some of it is indeed rather powerful, particularly the sensory intensifiers. It was a time before editors rose to power in the company, and it shows. Could do with more work.


Alternate Beginning for Metamorphosis Alpha: Here's another article that still has lots of general applicability today. Starting your players off as clones who have basic skills but no knowledge of the setting is a good thing to do when it's their first time, and you don't want to waste time doing infodumps. You can do similar things in other fantasy/sci-fi settings by having them start as ignorant peasants who've never left their village, or people from the real world who've gone through a portal/been frozen and woken up in the future. After all, it's worked for stories as different as Narnia and Thomas Covenant. And for all that people can hide their knowledge and try to avoid metagaming, it's never truly the same second time around. Use this trick when it most makes sense. Funnily enough, you can rebuild the 4th wall later.


Hints for D&D Judges: Joe Fischer was one of the people who never became a full writer for TSR, but still played a significant part in D&D's development. Someone was bound to introduce the ranger class eventually, but it might well have turned out very different. Similarly, being one of the first people to write about town and wilderness adventures gives him a little more influence than normal, as this three part article shows. He does put a fairly strong emphasis on mapping, wherever you are, that remained strong throughout the 80's, and has since fallen out of fashion. As with any clear step-by-step advice, this is excellent at helping you be creative when raw inspiration isn't with you, and much of this has fallen out of fashion enough that it feels fresh when reintroduced. There are good reasons to go back to the old school, and things like this are amongst them, because a clear picture of where everything is and why it's there still makes more sense than distorted close-up wide-angle shots and shakycam.

I have been following this thread since pretty much the beginning. When I inherited the mantle of Dragon's editor, I spent a LOT of time combing through the entire run of the magazine, reading almost every article that struck my fancy and sorting photocopies of key articles into a Byzantine series of subject folders that eventually formed the basis for the Dragon Compendium (which, incidentally, was to run for several volumes). I felt like that process really helped to attune my editorial sensibility during my time on the magazine, and it's been fun to compare your observations to my own.

This has been an amazing thread and an amazing journey. Congratulations on reaching the end.

And congratulations, too, on choosing to cover Polyhedron next. That is the PERFECT subject for your attention. I did a similar read through the entire history of that magazine before becoming its editor, and I dare say the journey ahead of you is more quirky and genuinely interesting in a novel sense than the one you just completed. You're in for a treat.

Which is what your reviews have been for all of us who have followed them.

Thank you for this monumental undertaking.

Erik Mona said:

This has been an amazing thread and an amazing journey. Congratulations on reaching the end.

And congratulations, too, on choosing to cover Polyhedron next. That is the PERFECT subject for your attention. I did a similar read through the entire history of that magazine before becoming its editor, and I dare say the journey ahead of you is more quirky and genuinely interesting in a novel sense than the one you just completed. You're in for a treat.

Click to expand...

I'm very pleased to hear that. It's funny that it would be the smaller magazines that change more over their lifespan.

Best of Dragon Magazine 1


part 2/6


The Play's the Thing: Ha. I'd forgotten they'd used this article title before Robin Laws so comprehensively made it his own. It's amusing because this is the kind of advice that might have seemed ground-breaking at one point, but we now take it for granted. Invest a little personality into your characters, and make them more than just avatars for fighting and exploration. Very valid when you've been wargaming for years, and view roleplaying as an evolution of that, but oddly enough, something new players are likely to do without even thinking about it. Definitely one of the stranger things about the hobby and how it originated.


Languages: Ah yes, the whole languages rigamarole in OD&D. You got a set amount based on your intelligence, plus a few extra if a demihuman, and that was it, since they had yet to introduce a skill system. Most races only had a single language that everyone spoke. And they never did entirely clear up what the hell alignment tongues were. This can lead to both frustration and amusing parody, as the whole ability to speak Were-St-Bernard indicates. Definitely don't miss this bit of clunkiness, and it definitely reminds me why many people found Runequest preferable as soon as it came out. There are just so much more elegant ways of handling the communication business.


The Development of Towns in D&D: A second, longer set of worldbuilding advice in pretty much the same vein as Joe Fischer's. Your worldbuilding needs to balance ensuring everything is there for the town to survive, and making things interesting for adventurers. Although, really, there seems to be more emphasis on the logistics side of things than making the town interesting in itself, apart from a section on tavern rumours, showing that they primarily see them as a place to go between dungeon-crawls rather than primary adventure locations in themselves. The days when the monsters come too and live among you are yet to come. So this article reminds me that those were more innocent times, and there's a lot of basic assumptions they have yet to be disabused of. So it goes. Muahahaha.


Let there be a Method to your Madness: This one is also an expansion of the same things said just a few pages ago, talking about building dungeons by considering who built them and what their purpose (and budget) was. Despite there being far less explored territory, they still wound up rehashing themselves even in the early issues. This is a bit tiresome, especially since I've seen variations on this spiel all down the line. You certainly didn't have to do it twice within the same collection, and lose a mark as editors for that.


Designing for Unique Wilderness encounters: This one is ALSO repeating and expanding on Joe Fischer's advice, which makes me think they did this deliberately. Still, at least by offering random terrain generation tables, they're giving more practical assistance than just telling you to think logically about these things, and come up with stuff based on that. But still, this is getting very tiresome, and makes me think this best of could have been even smaller and still retained it's value. NEXT!


The Total Person in Metamorphosis Alpha: We already had an article for determining your physical description randomly in MA. Now we expand that, so you can randomly determine your backstory as well. Actually seems like it's more of use to the DM, as they're more likely to need to make a whole batch of NPC's in a hurry. I suppose it demonstrates how different the default was back then, with random generation as standard. Many people took that for granted all through the 80's. It doesn't seem particularly applicable to games other than MA or Gamma World, so I don't think I'll be able to get much use out of it, but it's still interesting as a historical artifact. This is how building a well-rounded character with depth worked back in the day.


How Heavy is my Giant: The Square-Cube law is such a damper on our fantastical imaginations. It's also a problem in OD&D in particular because of the bounded ability score ranges, making the difference between human peak and giant strength seem too small, while not allowing for truly gargantuan creatures at all. So this little realism in fantasy article is a somewhat frustrating one to be reminded of, but also fascinating because it goes into a good deal of mathematical detail that the D&D rules just can't match up to. You have writers making up monster descriptions on the fly, and then you have to deal with the logical consequences, which can be rather a headache. This is really a precursor to the Ecologies, examining how a monster fits into the world, and how devastating they could really be to the environment. (including the formula for how deep their footprints would be) It's another thing they haven't done in quite a while, and I'm surprised they lost interest in, since you can go endlessly down the rabbit hole by examining the logical consequences of things. Oh well, we'll always have the ones that do exist, and there are plenty of them.

This has been a truly Herculean effort, (un)reason! Congrats, and thanks for all the fish... er, reviews!

Best of Dragon Magazine 1


part 3/6


Notes from a Semi-Successful D&D Player: Sometimes trying to apply logic to your fantasy game ruins the fun. Other times, it makes it even more fun, such as Jim Ward's twinky tricks that take advantage of existing spells and equipment, and use them to brutal effect. Polymorphing, poison, blinding, and the now ubiquitous continual light stone. Use them right and you can win a battle in a single strike. After all, when many random monsters can take out a party member every round, (or a whole bunch in the case of beholders) it's only fair. God, that really rubs in how things have changed, given how much effort they've put in since then to keep you from short-circuiting encounters. It's a whole different philosophy. And one which makes what you learn in game more applicable to real life conflicts, where things are almost never fair. I think this is a case where we could learn from the old schoolers, because if we were put in a challenge under an unfamiliar system, they would kick our asses.


Tolkien in Dungeons & Dragons: This one I definitely remember. The whole D&D is not just based on Tolkien, just because we used his demihumans rant. This is one where I'm feeling a bit more magnanimous than the first time around. Then, I definitely felt that the writer doth protest too much. Now, I can understand more why they'd be irritated that people take one element of what they did and focussed on it to the exclusion of everything else. And I can definitely understand their preference for episodic tales of adventure rather than making the whole campaign into one epic story of saving the world, as it's hard to run those when you have a large rotating pool of players who may or may not be there each session. I do still think they're overstating Middle-earth's uselessness for other adventures though. It was full of weird little magical bits that didn't fit into the larger picture, like Beorn, Tom Bombadil, talking animals (and purses), vampires, etc, and there was plenty of room for other people to make their mark beyond the stories in the Silmarillion, since there were thousands of years and several continents left uncovered. It's well worth mining some more, especially the unfinished tales and histories.


The meaning of Law and Chaos in D&D: This is one I remember very clearly too. Turning D&D from a 3 alignment system to an asymmetrical 5 alignment system, with an 8x11 set of subdivisions within each quadrant as an interim before they went for the full 9 point 3x3 grid. It's just so oddly specific, and yet different from the form they stuck with for 3 editions. (before curiously, moving back toward it in 4e. ) Like their original conception of the planes, I have to wonder where it came from, and why it's so different from the fantasy that was supposedly their inspiration. Here's to uniqueness. After all, it may be risky, but it's what we remember in the long run.


D&D is only as good as the DM: In which Gary reminds us that we shouldn't give out xp and magical items too generously, and let players progress beyond the levels the game is designed to handle. As with the Tolkien in D&D article, there's a definite feel that Gary had a personal vision of what D&D should be, and was a little pissed off that other people wound up playing it in such a different way, and tried to add rules to make the game work better for those playstyles. Sometimes you've got to set your baby free to let it reach it's full potential. This does leave me wondering what 2e would have been like if he'd remained at the helm. Obviously the classes from Unearthed Arcana would have stayed in, but would we have missed out on the huge variety of settings and sourcebooks for things like historical time periods in return. It seems quite probable, since even in 1985 he was calling for a return to the roots of gaming, rather than all this froofy obsession with character detail. Definitely stuff worth thinking about here, and a reminder that our history could have gone in a very different direction at several junctions.


Gary Gygax on Dungeons & Dragons: Another article that reminds us that Gary's view on D&D history was filled with self-aggrandisement, as he makes it absolutely clear that he was more important to the creation of D&D than Dave Arneson. Sure, it was Dave's idea to turn Chainmail into a game of dungeon delving where each player controlled a single character, but Gary did all the heavy lifting to turn it into a publishable manuscript, and most of the early promotional work, and he was proved right when he published it despite Dave not thinking it was ready. Taking responsibility gives you power, and history is written by the winners. (or at least survivors) How differently would the story have been told if someone else was doing it? Even after 30 years of building up a legend, I'm not one to believe the hype.


The Dungeons & Dragons Magic System: Still more ramblings from Gary, as he gets sick of explaining and justifying his design decisions to every new player who doesn't understand why he made it this way and thinks a spell point system would work better. It really isn't rocket science. If spellcasters used a spell point system, they could spam a single spell instead of having to think carefully about their selection and use each one cleverly. Plus if they could use their spells more frequently, the individual spells would need to be weaker for them to remain balanced with other classes. The lengthy memorisation times and rolls to learn spells at all also keep them from being able to dominate the game until they get to high level, and their higher XP costs mean they have to work harder to get to a particular level at all. Really, this serves to point out where both 3e and 4e got it wrong. 3e by removing the logistical checks and balances on wizards and CoDzilla so they no longer had to work harder offscreen to make up for their greater flexibility, and 4e by cutting down their magic selections and capabilities to the point where they were completely nonwondrous in the name of encounter level balance rather than campaign level. No edition has got it entirely right, and this still definitely needs more thinking about. How do we get suitably mythic spellcasters and not leave the warriors feeling overshadowed in out games?