Advertorials with no game content in Dragon

[Cam Banks]

I still haven't finished Final Fantasy X yet. I have two kids, a day job, and a busy freelance career on the side, and every time I sit down to play the game I feel a wave of guilt and play a round or two of SoulCalibur II instead.

Cheers,
Cam

 

[JoeGKushner]

If it brought in enough ad revenue to drop the cover price from $7.99, bring it on.

Otherwise, dump it like the cold turkey it is.

 

[WizarDru]

And I'm another one of those longtime Dragon readers (so old that I still call it "The Dragon") who missed non-D&D content in the magazine. This bothers me not a whit, and I don't even like Final Fantasy.

I'm with you. My game encompasses more than just another article about the ecology of the dark mantle and spells for left-handed juggling half-orc divination specialists. Must every page be like a splatbook? I LIKE getting notification about products that I might like. If they did a two-page preview of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic next issue, I'd be cool with that, too.

I prefer an honest-to-goodness coverage article on something like FFXII as opposed to those awful Silicon Sorcery articles of a couple years back with crude d20 content that had little to do with the games from which they were borrowed (the Asheron's Call article, for example, really struck me as a major missed opportunity).

 

[trancejeremy]

The thing with reviews/previews of video/computer games, is they are incredibly dated. They are useful for the moment the magazine comes out at most, but a year from now, 2 years from now, 10 years from now, they are worthless. I noticed this when I had the Dragon Archive - it was depressing how little useful material there was in the early dragons, because you had game and book reviews, and other filler that is no longer even remotely useful.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Just for a counter-stance, I'm an "old-school" reader myself, and I, for one, don't miss the non-D&D material in the slightest. I know it's an old saw, but it still holds true: I buy Dragon for D&D material. If I want non-D&D material, I'll buy other stuff. I don't want non-D&D material in my Dragon.

That said, I'm also with the group that says "If it helps with Dragon's revenue, and it doesn't presage any larger changes, I can live with it."

 

[Dark Psion]

I too am a long time reader of Dragon and back then if I didn't read about it in Dragon, I would not know about that product.

But in the modern Internet age by the time it appears in a magazine, I have either got it or decided not to buy it. Now if it included some D&D content, the like the chocobo stats that one article did, then it is at least a little bit useful.

The main problem is that I buy Dragon for its D&D content and if I wanted video game information there are a dozen other magazines I would go to first because they would provide the in depth information I would want.

Personally, they could scrap the whole First Watch section and I would not care. I usually just skip it anyway and had to go back and look at this Final Fantasy article anyway because I had just ignored thinking it was just an ad.

 

[Ed_Laprade]

I don't buy Dragon or play Final Fantasy, so I seem to see this in a different way than anyone else. Printing. You do NOT add just two pages to a magazine! You add a minimum of four, probably eight (which I think Dragon does, it used to) or sixteen. So either they've reduced the D&D content by two pages (how does that add to the D&D goodness?) or they've added six pages of other stuff. Has the page count gone up?

 

[WayneLigon]

I have no problem with non-D&D content in Dragon, or even non-tabletop articles as long as they're short. It helps to see such things, because it expands your horizons and broadens your experience; such things add to the D&D experience. Like Final Fantasy or not, it helps you to be somewhat familiar with it because your players probably are. Your future fantasy authors, artists and game designers certainly are.

 

[el-remmen]

My favorite feature from the old days was "The Role of Books" - which had about a half-dozen or so reviews of fantasy/sci-fi books (occasional gamebools) which were 2 to 3 paragraphs long each and zeroed in on the gaming aspects that could be gleaned from them. I found a ton of great nuggets and ideas in those old articles without ever having to read all those books, but also learned about some books I later sought out.

I miss that kind of stuff.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

My favorite feature from the old days was "The Role of Books" - which had about a half-dozen or so reviews of fantasy/sci-fi books (occasional gamebools) which were 2 to 3 paragraphs long each and zeroed in on the gaming aspects that could be gleaned from them. I found a ton of great nuggets and ideas in those old articles without ever having to read all those books, but also learned about some books I later sought out.

I miss that kind of stuff.

I used to like the book and game reviews.

sigh...the good ol' days.