Was there a "classic run"?

[Vegepygmy]

For the very little that it's worth, I'll say 50-110. I agree with Celebrim that the magazine became more professional after that; I just don't think of that as "classic" or "golden."

 

[Garthanos]

Most probably too early to call it a classic period, but I would nominate the current 4e run of dragon, mainly due to its usefulness. So far every issue has had at least one article that has found its way into my current campaign.

Well this corresponds to the first time I have actually subscribed ;-)
(acquired a couple dozen from a friend back in the 80's I think)
but the term classic implies a clinging to nostalgia... which limits it

 

[JohnRTroy]

To me, the classic era was before 2nd Edition, not so much because of the editions but because of the following: (I started with #48, but I guess you can include earlier times).

1) Classic Gygax, as well as Greenwood and Moore and LL. The key thing about Gygax leaving was he eventually took Kim Mohan with him, that's when Roger Moore became editor. As editor, he stopped being the contributor he used to be, and IMO was a waste of his creative talent.

2) Better articles--some were written in an almost scholarly manner--some articles had footnotes and bibliographies. I felt like nobody was writing down to me. It was a nice time.

3) They still had fiction and great cartoons.

4) Giants in the Earth--before 2nd Edition, you actually saw authors trying to put their favorite protagonists in D&D stats. It was a time before the game industry felt it had to bow to copyright, which changed when TSR started publishing fiction and becoming more popular. Hell, remember the April Fools issues with Donald and Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, etc.? (Bugs is a 15th level Chaotic Good Illusionist).

5) Letters columns that were serious debates and well thought out. You could see the rise and fall of memes. Those days are gone now with the Internet forums taking over.

 

[Celebrim]

For the very little that it's worth, I'll say 50-110. I agree with Celebrim that the magazine became more professional after that; I just don't think of that as "classic" or "golden."

You know me, I just won't let this sort of thing go...

Apparantly, 'classic' and 'golden' means then 'little remembered' and 'poor quality'. I went back and looked at few in the run from 40-74, and objectively, it's pretty bad. The layout is very cheap. The cover art usually appears to be very amateur. The articles are very uneven, really, no better than the sort of 'fan essays' that you might find at EnWorld, perhaps worse. The monsters are generally forgetable or forgotten (I didn't remember most of them, and had never used any of them). Even the typeface is ugly. It might be a great golden exciting period for the game as a whole, but Dragon in this period seems to me to be very extraneous.

A suprising amount of time in the 40-74 period is devoted to articles demonstrating the complete lack of forethought and balance in 1st edition AD&D, and making suggestions as to fix it. The arguments as to the lack of balance are usually convincing, but the suggestions rather less so (nothing seems to have become of them). One of the more interesting articles I read from the period was attempting to add some sanity and consistancy to how illusion magic was arbitrated, which, from the letters recieved was clearly all across the board. The magazine as a whole resembles a dead tree edition of EnWorld, with DM's swapping advice, some good and some bad.

About #75 I think things begin to pick up, and I can see some argument for #75ish through #90ish being a really classic run (for reasons outlined by jmucchiello), but I have a hard time seeing what people looking at the older period are nostalgic for. Have you gone back and looked at those issues lately?

I still would put the period from 180ish to 200ish up against anything Dragon ever did in terms of quality, with a pretty good run to about 25 issues to either side of that. It was IMO the beginning of a pretty dismal period for the game, but its also a period were most of the best stuff being published for the game is in Dragon and Dungeon.

 

[Celebrim]

2) Better articles--some were written in an almost scholarly manner--some articles had footnotes and bibliographies. I felt like nobody was writing down to me. It was a nice time.

Better written than #190's 'Monsters of the Deep', or #152's 'In a Cavern, in a Canyon...'? Footnotes and bibliographies certainly didn't disappear from Dragon in later issues.

 

[Ariosto]

Both the technical means and the aesthetic fashions in RPG-magazine design are considerably different today than they were a quarter-century and more ago.

To call the cover art "very amateur" seems to me utterly unwarranted. Picking up #50 (June 1981), I can compare the cover -- by Carl Lundgren, a painter of hundreds of book covers and a Hugo Award nominee -- with actual amateur work of the time on the covers of Alarums & Excursions, The Lords of Chaos, Quick Quincy Gazette, etc.. I can compare it with the work of, e.g., Michael Whelan from 1977.

I do not think #50 stands out as exceptional in professionalism, although Dragon then certainly featured a wide variety of styles -- some of which may be as little to your taste as much of what is a la mode today is to mine.

As to the content, I found a definite drop in the level of interest for me in the later 1980s. As I recall, the magazine headed into the 2nd Edition AD&D period with too many over-long and under-creative essays. That's another matter of personal preference, though.

 

[Ariosto]

The magazine as a whole resembles a dead tree edition of EnWorld, with DM's swapping advice, some good and some bad.

The APAs (amateur press associations, bundling individuals' "zines" together for redistribution) were even more so. This was before the ubiquity of the World Wide Web. Science-fiction fans with mimeograph machines invented an "internet" before the electronic computer!

 

[Garthanos]

The APAs (amateur press associations, bundling individuals' "zines" together for redistribution) were even more so. This was before the ubiquity of the World Wide Web. Science-fiction fans with mimeograph machines invented an "internet" before the electronic computer!

Alarums and Excursions zine was very much the stuff you will see people posting in their blogs and websites now and some of it was very cool and some of the people doing it were pros too... and yeah they also chatted back and forth with it.... cool correlation really.(this gives me a real nostalgia jolt... I published in A&E)

 

[TerraDave]

In my opinion, the true Gold Era of Dragon was about #98 to #200.

You threw me with this. I mean I like Roger Moore as much of the next guy, he is responsible for the Half-Ogre as a PC race, but still.

I am glad to see other chime in with ~100 as the cut off point.

But anyways, I dug into my collection, looked at 200, 199, 198.

They where ok. You have got to love the hollogram on 200, but they just seemed to suffer from the same bladness that most "core" products seem to suffer in that period. I mean, they wheren't all bad, but the things I liked tended to be things I liked in pre 100 issues.

Earlier issues of dragon gave you:

-many of key buidling blocks of what would be ADD (in its earliest fanzine phase)

-how people actually played. (in its earliest fanzine phase especially, and I will come back to this)

-adventures in the same mag.

-(more likely then later) minigames in the same mag.

-(more likely then later) reviews, including negative review of TRS products

-coverage of other games

-a wider range of D&D content (like stats for copywritted charecters from fiction)

-less bland, pre 2E style

-gygax

In general, even with gygax and "official material" it felt less like a house organ of TSR.

On the other hand, if you like a polished style with lots of in game useable content, then Paizo era would seem to be better, and its current incarnation maybe the best, with most content done by staff and available online.

For me thats ok, but I also like stuff about the game as well as for the game, and the earlier issues seem to be a "golden age" for that.

 

[TerraDave]

I went back and looked at few in the run from 40-74, and objectively, it's pretty bad.

Oh well. Tastes differ.

(70-100 are the issues I know best, but I do really like many of the earlier ones, in some cases I think for reasons you dislike them).