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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8461450" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 79: January 1993part 4/5The Art of Winning: Skip makes another attempt to increase engagement for their competitions by reminding us that it's not actually that hard to win as long as you follow all the instructions carefully. They don't actually get that many entries on most of them, and a significant percentage get disqualified by not following basic procedural details, so if you can come up with a complete idea, write it down coherently and then give it decent formatting (and not overegged with tons of fiddly fonts and color changes that wouldn't transfer to the newszine's printing process anyway) before sending it in you've actually got a decent chance. The bar seems so low when you phrase it like that, yet many people still manage to fall short. This all leads up to this month's competition, which is quite a significant one. They're finally trying their hand at a Living Gamma World location, and the details of the first few submissions will set the boundaries for all the ones that follow. Get in on the ground floor, and you could make a big difference! Will they finally be able to give a non D&D system a decent amount of airtime and worldbuilding for a few years at least, or will it fall at the starting gate and go nowhere? This definitely has my interest. Looking forward to finding out what happens next.Adding To The Anvil: Another of those topics that turned up repeatedly in Dragon and makes me sigh every time I have to deal with it. Someone thinks nonweapon proficiencies aren't realistic enough and splits them into more, more specific ones, in the process increasing the total number you need to really get comprehensive knowledge of all the aspects of a thing and making it more inaccessible to PC's. This time it's weapon crafting they're turning their attention too, separating out blacksmithing, whitesmithing, and knowing how to properly add jewels to the armour & weapons you craft. This will not improve matters in the vast majority of campaigns, and is a whole load of wasted effort for me, particularly after having seen subsequent editions go the opposite direction and pare down the complexity of the skill system without affecting the overall degree of fun. The fundamentals are sufficiently poorly designed that no amount of tinkering with the surface elements can fix them. The new kit at the end is particularly bad mechanically, adding a minor benefit in crafting magic weapons that higher level wizards can do anyway, at the cost of an across the board -15% chance at learning new spells. Really not worth it.</blockquote>

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