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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8129316" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 38: Oct/Nov/Dec 1987part 5/5The New Rogues Gallery: Another 5 characters that are clearly just an actual adventuring group sent in by their players. A ranger that's been half turned into a tree, probably because there's no PC-friendly Ent race in D&D and they really wanted to play one. A dashing acrobat with a magical boomerang. An arrogant yet loyal and protective wizard. A somewhat rebellious wandering cleric. And a somewhat more cunning than usual cavalier. All are unambiguously heroic and get along with one-another pretty well, so your reasons to come into conflict with them are pretty limited. Another of these articles that won't be very useful for other people's campaigns. I can understand why people would want to write them, but not why they would want to read them.The Role of Taxes: Now here's a topic that shows up over and over again. Reminders that taxes are a thing, and maybe you should remember to include them in your game appeared several times in Dragon, with varying degrees of humorousness over the years. Here's another single page article that plays it fairly straight, reminding us that all these kingdoms need to keep themselves economically functional in some way or another, but also that although things have GP values listed in the books, this is just a ballpark, and prices can vary widely due to supply, demand and your negotiating ability. (unless things do have an objective magically determinable price in your universe, like people have alignment, which would have very interesting ramifications on your world if explored logically) Similarly, if you're sufficiently badass, your group effectively becomes a state in itself and can largely ignore taxes, just like many real world corporations that pay negligible or even negative amounts through a combination of offshore accounts, loopholes, rebates and subsidies. But in the meantime, you're going to have to deal with arbitrary percentages of your money and stuff being taken away when you go back to town. Strong incentive to not take it all back, and keep it in somewhere well hidden (possibly with guardian monsters and traps, in which case we're right back where we started <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ) until you need it. I guess the important thing is that if you're going to make a big deal out of tax enforcement in your game, you need to do it in an interesting way that generates more adventures, not a boring one that just irritates the players and wastes time. At least this article has it's priorities straight in that respect.Pleasing to see a proper themed issue in here, but there's a lot of stuff in it that's not very useful, due to a combination of self-indulgent whimsy and clumsy experimentation. Since those two things turned up a lot in the 2e era, I guess it's a sign of the times. Just got to keep on picking out the good bits and discarding the rest. Let's see how next issue fares compared to Sturgeon's law.</blockquote>

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