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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8400986" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 71: May 1992part 1/534 pages. Another demonstration of caster supremacy over fighters. Once you get a few levels under your belt, you can buff all your physical stats and effortlessly outlift & outrun the people who spent years training the hard way, and also be able to control minds, change shapes, fly & all that jazz they can't even begin to replicate. A common complaint in most editions of D&D, particularly as the number of supplements builds up. Let's see if what's inside further increases that disparity. The consistent cavalcade of contests continues. This month's is for game designers. It's very specific. Design an adventure with precisely 6 encounters, 5 of which must fit specific categories & final one a wild card. This pretty much forces the adventures to be short and linear, which is the way they seem to like them, and I'm really not very fond of. I know you have to fit them into 4 hour slots, but even that format doesn't necessitate this degree of formulaicness. This seems likely to encourage people to submit more linear and predictable adventures that fall apart if the players exercise too much creativity in the future, which is a bad sign.Notes From HQ: Another year, another editorial talking about the good the RPGA does on top of their gaming. Once again they're running charity benefit tournaments to raise money for for guide dogs. You can choose between a Spelljammer one, or, very fittingly, a Fluffyquest one. This suggests that both of these adventure incline even more towards the comedic than usual for the RPGA, and are primarily a way to blow off steam and feel like you're supporting a good cause than any serious tactical challenge for your characters. If they ever get reprinted here I doubt I'll be giving them very high ratings. Oh well, I can't do anything about it, and thinking about it more will just irritate, so let's move on and deal with that if it happens. Letters: The first two letters both complain that GM's don't get prizes for being highly rated by their players in the same way as the other way around. They do more work than the players, so surely they should get some reward. They tried it recently, but found it actually created perverse incentives that reduced the total number of games they could run, as GM's only wanted the groups that are likely to get them the best scores, and would simply drop out of the less prestigious single-round games or go easy on the players in hopes of getting better votes instead of running the enemies smartly. They're forced to conclude it's a bad idea.The final one tackles a similarly divisive topic. The RPGA as a whole has no problem with kids joining, but many individual clubs do. Be it an issue of playstyles when a group has people of vastly different ages, or wanting to avoid even the appearance of recruiting for the purposes of pederasty, there are good reasons why you might enforce an age limit, but at the same time, if you reject them from gaming altogether, you hurt the long-term health of the hobby. Maybe they should create a separate young gamer's tournament division? This definitely feels like it needs a few more opinions before they make a firm decision.</blockquote>

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