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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8408782" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 72: June 1992part 1/532 pages. Ooh. a fishman. Do we have another full-on underwater special on our hands, or just a single article? Will it be doing anything to make long-term underwater adventures accessible for players, or merely a few more antagonists to trouble them on the beaches and ships? Like adventures in space, these options are consistently underrepresented when you consider the amount of the universe they take up compared to the land. Time to see what this issue has to add to my toolset.With Great Power: The RPGA has been using pure point buy rather than random generation for several years now, and in new RPG's, that is increasingly becoming the majority. Another way that the FASERIP system seems increasingly dated, given the massive degree of precision-tuned customisation available in it's rivals. So Dale uses this column to provide a new character creation system that's free of randomness. As it's only a single page column, he doesn't time to meticulously playtest & price every power in the book according to it's in-game utility, so they're simply divided into regular and double cost ones, and the GM is warned that they'll need to watch out for broken builds themselves. It's progress, but they'll still need to do a new edition to really catch up with the competitors and have more people see these refinements instead of just putting it in a magazine article. Interesting, but very incomplete, this definitely needs a few follow-ups to reach it's full potential. Still, he says this article is part of a series, so hopefully we'll be seeing those in the near future.Notes From HQ: Oooh. They've moved offices again, getting a bigger place with multiple rooms instead of just one big open plan thing with cubicles. That may be a long term improvement for them, but they also have to worry about losing or leaving behind some of the paperwork, so the short-term may be a little rocky. Other bureaucratic details fill the rest of the editorial, showing they never cease to be a problem. They're increasing the deadline modules have to be in by to 6 months before the intended convention. If they aren't fully written & in their hands by then, they'll use something else and what you sent will be assigned to another one if it's used at all. However, they're cutting the deadline for the classified page to only 3 months in advance, due to improvements in their computer technology accelerating their turnaround. In addition to individual & club memberships, they're also including family ones, so you don't need to assemble half a dozen people to start getting some economy of scale benefits. Good luck recruiting. Lots of little tweaks, that hopefully add up to increased membership and smoother running conventions. Fingers crossed, and don't be afraid to revert to the previous methods if it turns out a change is actually for the worse.The Living City: Tim Beach lives up to his name by talking about swimming lessons in Raven's Bluff. As a coastal city, there are indeed plenty of opportunities to hit the sand (although surf's a little rarer, since it's an enclosed inland sea so tides are weak) and go for a paddle. Since attacks from aquatic monsters aren't unknown, it's sensible to learn in groups with a trained instructor. Obviously there's no floorplan this time, so most of the word count is dedicated to the three instructors, a cleric of Eldath, a Ranger, and an Enchanter. All have well above Charisma and are specifically noted as looking good in their swimsuits. ( :sighs, inserts rant about how a bit of body fat is actually far better for swimming than visibly shredded muscle definition, due to both insulation and lower overall density, as demonstrated by most aquatic mammals: ) Ruleswise, this one is a bit problematic too, as it allows you to improve your swimming proficiency with relatively minor GP and time expenditure without spending any slots, which would interact badly with the rules if applied to other skills. 2e does desperately need to decouple your number of skills from your level and allow you to buy more of them so you can have skilled low level characters who are useful to players at some mundane thing, but this goes too far the other way, particularly when it comes to the upper reaches of proficiency level, which do hit diminishing returns and get increasingly hard to improve in reality. So this one is more than a little irritating on both a setting and system writing level. I feel no particular inclination to go splashing around here.</blockquote>

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