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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8211126" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 48: July 1989part 4/5The Critical Hit pt 1: The review column decides they can't avoid the elephant in the room in the RPG world, and publishes a review of the AD&D 2e Player's Handbook. Future Paizo CEO Lisa Stevens gives it a fairly critical appraisal, pointing out both the areas she thinks it improves on it's predecessor, and the ones it's actually worse. It's definitely more clearly written and better organised, but it's also double the size and moves a lot of the info that was in the 1e DMG into here, so you have to wade through a lot of material that isn't strictly necessary if you're only planning to be a player before you can actually get down to gaming. Some of the class design decisions and divisions still seem pretty arbitrary, and if she were in charge she'd have made different choices. Well, if that isn't some substantial foreshadowing for the things Pathfinder changes from 3e. Overall, her conclusion is positive. (Not that they'd have published it if it wasn't, as this is still a TSR subsidiary) After all, if they'd screwed this up they could wind up tanking a whole edition, and letting someone else temporarily claim the top spot in the RPG world. <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=";)" /> Massive amounts of foreshadowing aside, this is also a pretty decent review, breaking things down analytically and saying precisely which bits are good and bad. That's the kind of attitude you need to iteratively improve things. The Critical Hit pt 2: Following on from the Player's Handbook, they quite logically do the Dungeon Master's guide next. (but not the first monstrous compendium, which would still be at the printers when this was being written) Since the new PHB has taken a lot of the material that was in the old DMG, that begs the question of what they'll replace it with. The answer - lots of optional stuff! So this review instantly spots the big difference in overall philosophy between the two edition's designs. 1e was intended to tighten up the rules and standardise everyone's playstyle so tournament games could be run consistently. 2e is intended as a framework for lots of different campaign worlds, some which are indeed very different from the default dungeoncrawling fantasy the core rules assume. Speaking of dungeoncrawling, they also spot that XP for treasure is no longer the default, and you just need to defeat enemies, not kill them to get experience, so killing everything and taking their stuff is not rewarded as strongly as it used to be. This encourages roleplaying & finding noncombat solutions to challenges, and also means campaigns will last longer before you hit the kind of power levels where the rules start to break down. A pretty good assessment of which way the wind is blowing in the TSR offices. Despite the title still being AD&D, the writers grow tired of dungeon delving and dragon killing, and want to set their horizons higher. Now they just have to bring enough of their fanbase along for the ride without splitting it too much.</blockquote>

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