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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 7960129" data-attributes="member: 27780">TSR RPGA No. 3: Winter 1981-2part 4/4Gamma World Art Contest: You may have noticed there's not much artwork for these new monsters, and what there is pretty scrappy. So here's a second contest in quick succession as they try and get free artwork out of their readers. (All rights surrendered to the company, of course, don't forget the SASE so they don't even have to pay to tell you if you won or lost.) Even as a company rockets upwards into a multimillion empire, they'll still exploit the free labor of fandom when they can get it. Sigh. Same as it ever was.Notes For the Dungeon Master: Another 10 ideas for how to screw the players over with deceptive dangers and double-bluffs. Casting spells on a Gas Spore to make it more convincing as a fake beholder, letting monsters actually use their magical items to buff themselves, and good old pit traps, but used in unexpected ways. Muahaha. Yeah, these aren't going away any time soon. Just how many can you fit in your game before the players become so paranoid that nothing gets done due to distrusting everything and questioning the DM on everything they see before making any moves at all?Notes From Overseas: Don Turnbull fills in another small article showing how things differ in the UK. We don't need to pay for the first year's membership, it comes for free with the D&D basic set if you can be bothered to fill out the form! The joys of living in a mildly more socialist country. Little acts of generosity can more than pay for themselves by increasing the long-term userbase, spreading the costs and getting better network externalities. How many more people got into roleplaying in europe because they're not saddled with vast amounts of medical debt eating up their income or just plain dead? Man, would that be a complicated question to actually answer. I don't think I have the tools to tackle it just for a little review like this. Spelling Bee: So, the first spell to get a full column devoted to analysing it is the ever popular invisibility and it's many variants. Unsurprising, as like any illusory effect, it's far more subjective and susceptible to rules-lawyering than a simple blasting spell, and it's too common in the source material to ban from the game. Because it's simpler to adjudicate, most of them treat it as a one-time creature-linked effect, so anything picked up by the invisible creature remains visible, while anything leaving their possession becomes visible again, until the whole thing is dropped and another spell is cast. This contrasts with psionic invisibility, which is a clouding of the mind rather than bending light or turning things transparent, or a Harry Potter style cloak, which conceals everything underneath it and makes for easy adding of new items to the effect. So there's one way it generally works in D&D, but they're aware of other ones, and given the exception-based nature of powers, it's entirely possible to add new ones that use the other methods. This shows rules lawyering is already alive and thriving, if anything made necessary by the vagueness of the rules as written and the generally adversarial nature of play. You've got to fight for every advantage you can both in and out of game if you want your character to survive and advance levels when characters are fragile and the DM doesn't pull punches. Saga of Marnie: They set up two competitions this issue. Now they show the other side with a report by a winner of a previous one. Marnie Bosch led her team in kicking much ass in the first RPGA tournament, and as a result she got to go to another convention for free as a guest of honor and meet Gary & Frank, who were thankfully in non-cantankerous mode for hobnobbing with the fans. One of those little reminders that there were women in gaming even in the early days, and they were often the ones doing the invisible work to organise groups, make a party get along and work as a competent team. One person only has one set of actions per round, no matter how twinked they are. Get a good team and stick with them if you really want to win the game, as the real winning is in having fun playing. Incomplete Convention Schedule '82: The final page is filled up with the dates, locations and contact details of 22 different conventions coming up that year. Some of them look like they were more general fantasy/sci-fi than roleplaying specific, but it still shows you'll have no trouble finding geek-friendly places to go anywhere in the USA. They also show one in Canada, and one in Germany. Things may have spread more slowly back then, but gaming still became an international thing fairly easily. Definitely going to be interesting seeing how this side of the newszine grows over the years.The increase in size definitely makes for another substantial leap forward this issue, letting them provide more material that's generally useful for gaming rather than just what's up in the conventions of the day. It's indicates that there are definitely going to be some more old school gems in here that deserve a wider audience, and this trek will be worthwhile for the readers, not just a historical curiosity no-one but me cares about. Time to see how 1982 fares from this perspective.</blockquote>

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