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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 7984030" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 10: Jan/Feb 1983part 3/6Reiga Nerd has to put a genie back in it's bottle. This of course involves a pun-based incantation and several undead jokes for dessert. Well, they've got to beat those dead horses once they've killed them, or it'd be a waste of good feed lines.Mapping from Square One: A crucial part of dungeon-crawling is being able to find your way out again afterwards. A barbarian himbo rushing in with swords akimbo may slay the monsters, but if they can't find their way out, and preferably bring the treasure along, they may be in trouble long term. When D&D was being spread mostly by word of mouth, they could pass along the mapping conventions as new people learned, but now there's tons of new people coming in who don't know the unwritten conventions of the game, and this is causing playstyle problems. So unsurprisingly, this is Frank's attempt to teach them, make sure all the new tournament players know the exploration aspect of D&D is as important as the combat one, and you neglect it at your peril. Ultimately, a losing battle, as shown by the explosion of settings where dungeoncrawling was only a minor part in the 90's, and then 3e and onward official adventures concentrating on battle setpieces with much smaller, more linear maps connecting them, as the much faster advancement made extended sandbox exploration without scaling enemies much less practical. It's hard, seeing your baby grow up into something you didn't expect, but at some point you have to learn to let go. Not today though, not today. They'll be hanging on tight trying to get it to do it's homework and come back from parties before 11 for a good few years more. Encounters: Turns out the cover image wasn't of a D&D celestial at all, but a Gamma World mutant that just happens to look like an angel. They certainly act pretty angelically though, with the ability to read the emotions of others and preemptively know if they're friendly or hostile, and several mutations that'd seem like magic to the primitive and credulous. If your PC's aren't psychopathic murder-hobos they might well help them out. If they are, they'll have a much harder time with the secondary plot hook here as well, as the savage mooks are being organised by some sinister power. Now that's a classic plotline you can really build upon. This column continues to be one of the best and most useful parts of the newszine, packing both plenty of stats and plenty of plot hooks into a single page. Notes for the Dungeon Master: This column has entirely transitioned from cool ideas of things to do, to didactic lectures on what not to do. Gods are not characters or monsters. You can not fight them, you can not kill them, you can not trick them, you can not become one without centuries of tedious sucking up to them and joining at the very bottom of the hierarchy, and if you try you will be summarily erased from existence and memory. Yeeesh. That's not fun, and not the way it goes in most mythology at all. Even when the gods outpower the mortals by huge degrees, they can still be talked too, tricked and stolen from, and any revenge is usually of a dramatically appropriate kind rather than an abrupt curbstomping. Where did he get that attitude from? I know AD&D doesn't handle godhood well, with the numbers and bookkeeping becoming unwieldy before you even get to 20th level, but decades of other games have shown it is possible to create games where it's fun to play beings of immense cosmic power, puny mortals, and everything in between, and still have everyone able to contribute meaningfully to the story. So this is a very outdated rant that fully deserves to be left behind in the scrapheap of history, as it's been repeatedly disproved on both a narrative level and a mechanical one.</blockquote>

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