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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8494982" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 84: June 1993part 1/532 pages. That woman looks altogether too enthusiastic jumping off the top of the castle. I hope there's a safety net underneath, someone to cast feather fall, or some other method of ensuring health & safety is maintained. Given Raven's Bluff's level of technological inconsistency, I wouldn't count on it though. Let's find out how sensationalised and misleading this cover is inside. Take a Byte: This column isn't just promotion this time, (although there's still a fair bit of that) as it talks about the intersection of Wargaming and RPG's on computer. In the tabletop scene, the two are long connected, although the number of roleplayers has outstripped the number of wargamers for over a decade now. On computers, the boundaries between large scale abstracted wargames where you move units without ever seeing them as individuals and real time action adventure games like Zelda or Faxanadu are much more solid, partly because you simply can't have enough moving sprites on screen without slowdown and flicker to make a war scenario convincing. But computers get better every year, and SSI are trying to bridge the gap from both ends. Upcoming releases like Clash of Steel and War in Russia are primarily strategic games, but they hope to put in more RPG elements like cutscenes and advancable units. Meanwhile, they're doing a conquest game in Mystara where you might control individual PC's, but they're engaging in large scale schemes rather than dungeon delving. In hindsight, we know that eventually these two threads will merge into things like the Dynasty Warriors series, where you have wargame scenarios and RPG storylines, but any pretence of historical realism is abandoned for super awesome PC's that can mow down thousands of enemies in a single scenario. Even the highest level D&D characters can't come close in DPS output or staying power, and if you tried to have that many combatants at once, it'd take hours to run every single round under most tabletop systems. An interesting example of how trends in playstyle follow changes in technology, as new things become possible or new ways of abstracting things make a playstyle fun for a mass audience where most people would have found it tedious before. System matters. What else will it be possible to make fun in the future that doesn't quite work now?Notes From HQ: This is another round of complaints about people not following procedure. Not every tournament at a convention is approved by the RPGA, and only the ones that are will earn you points, so double check before you enrol and don't complain to us about anything that happens in one that has nothing to do with us. They're particularly peeved about a particular convention which lied and said an adventure was approved when it wasn't, as that means all the people who participated won't be getting points through no fault of their own. To make verification easier, they've set up an online database, so you can easily check if an adventure has jumped all the bureaucratic hoops and is sanctioned for this particular convention anywhere you've got internet access. They continue to be ahead of the rest of TSR on this front because necessity drives innovation, and it's obvious this is a persistent problem. Now if only the general price of the internet would come down so their boards were even more accessible. Still, every person encouraged to log on for the first time by reading things like this accelerates the expansion of the internet as a whole a little further. Maybe next year. Or even this september. <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=";)" /></blockquote>

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