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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8379925" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 67: January 1992part 5/5Broken Photocopiers: The promotional article this time is surprisingly interesting, as it covers something they never mentioned in Dragon. In part of Gamma World 4e's attempts to make the system more balanced and functional for a long term game, they've turned identifying ancient tech from something largely determined by GM fiat and player descriptive ability to it's own minigame where you make rolls and move around a flowchart until you either figure it out, give up due to time constraints or break it with your tinkering. Certain classes obviously gain bonuses on these rolls as they level up, letting them figure out increasingly tricky tech like computers more quickly and effectively. Making things other than combat more complex than basic pass/fail rolls to emphasise that they're important to the game and it's themes is the kind of thing I strongly approve of, and I'm just slightly irritated that I didn't find out about this first time around. Maybe I should give the various editions of gamma world a deeper delve at some point, see what I think about them in detail. The Living Galaxy: Roger rounds out his talk on treasure with lots of examples and reference works. Top Secret, Gamma World & Star Frontiers all have supplements devoted to equipment/treasure, and of course AD&D has multiple. You could play for years without exhausting the things on those random tables. If that's not enough, there are vast numbers of sci-fi novels where the high tech stuff is critical to the plot and would be very desirable in reality. Plus no matter what the tech level, social rewards are always going to be relevant, if possibly more ephemeral than cold hard cash. As with many previous instalments, this is a message that can be boiled down into a single sentence, and then a whole lot of padding. It's not bad, but it does outstay it's welcome. The flaw in being senior editor for their periodicals is that when he writes for them, the other ones aren't editing him as strictly as they could. This page count could definitely be used in a more efficient way. Amazing Stories gets a completely straight advert of the sort they'd do in their bigger magazines, not even a promotional article. That's slightly jarring to see in here, and another sign of gradual creeping commercialism. Will that disqualify them from entering as best amateur magazine this year, or can they skate by because it's still one TSR department promoting another for free?An issue where the system specific crunchy stuff is quite interesting, but the generic articles are once again pretty dull and familiar, not telling me anything I haven't heard before. The foreshadowing of more incoming Fluffyquest material over the year also fills me with trepidation. It leaves me with the definite impression that many of the articles this year will be a slog. Oh well, back over to the adventures part of this journey, which increasingly feel like a vacation given the higher quality and lower frequency I'm seeing them at the moment. Where will they be taking us this year?</blockquote>

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