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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8564108" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 46: Mar/Apr 1994part 1/584 pages: An early incidence of <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/zme97a/inside-the-strange-world-of-youtube-thumbnails" target="_blank">youtube thumbnail face</a> here, as the dwarf mugs for the painter while the wizard gets down to the real business. Will What Happens Next Shock You!,  or will it be formulaic challenges designed to satisfy the algorithm? Time to see if another issue is forward thinking, dated, or merely of it's time.Editorial: The editorial is devoted to a particularly long response to a letter. They were quite annoyed to find that many of the things they suggested not to do in your own adventure submissions had appeared in other recent adventures. Double standards? Not at all. Just a desire to avoid too much repetitiveness. Doing exactly the same thing over and over soon hits diminishing returns even if the quality stays the same. They want you to stretch your imagination and come up with adventures that aren't just more wanders through caverns or rescuing kidnapped princesses. You can send one of those in, but it'll be held to higher standards because they've already done that. Another reminder that they reject a lot of adventures for every one they publish, and a lot of that filtering is ones that aren't exactly bad, just cliched and not bringing anything new to the table. The trouble with being a professional in a field and immersed in it every day is developing more sophisticated tastes than the people you're selling too and having to either consciously dumb things down for mass consumption or risking leaving your audience behind. It's a battle that only gets harder, and a good reason why you need to change the lead person up every now and then in long-running franchises. Even if they do go back to basics, they'll do it in their own way. Excessive jadedness is no fun for anybody.Letters: First letter is a lengthy one replying to the letter a couple of issues ago about aimless players. Remember that you control everything they see, hear and touch. If they're bored it's because you haven't provided the right information to hook their attention.Second continues the debate on types of adventures, wanting ones that are more setting and less linear plot. They're the ones that really remain useful over the course of a whole campaign. If they put their mind to it, they could easily come up with their own rival to Raven's Bluff for readers to build on month by month.Third notices that it's been a while since they published any adventures by Willie Walsh. Is he ok? Several more are in the pipeline so yes, he's alive and well. Thanks for your concern.Fourth combats the problem of aimless or disruptive players by reminding you that you can actually talk about the kind of campaign you want to run with your group, make sure everyone's on the same page, and if someone isn't interested in that playstyle, drop out gracefully. if you just worldbuild in isolation and then drop them in the middle of it, don't be surprised if they don't operate on the same implicit assumptions as you.Fifth worries about the long term risks of putting anachronisms like steam trains in your campaign. Don't do it unless you're prepared for your players to run with the implications and change the world accordingly.Sixth is insulted by the idea that there's a natural progression from hack & slash to rules mastery to focussing more on roleplaying. There's real skill needed to survive those old tournament adventures and a lot of modern players wouldn't last beyond the first room. They should stop being so snobby and respect the old ways because their life may depend upon them someday.Seventh has yet more advice for the stumped DM. It once again boils down to actually communicating with your players. Roleplaying is a fundamentally social pastime so the most inept nerds are forced to either learn or drop out.Eighth is another of the periodic complaints from people who'd prefer them to do more gritty low magic adventures, particularly when it comes to treasure allocations and assumption of literacy. Another area where doing this long term pushes things towards the more fantastical, simply because you've done the first few levels many times and worrying about encumbrance, rations & dysentery gets boring after a while. A fresh editor would probably bring that down again, at least for a little while.Finally, someone annoyed at the rules lawyers. It's your game, a DM should be able to do whatever they want. If you had to deal with a larger, more wargamey group you'd soon change your tune. As we explored over in Polyhedron, creating the best balance between fun & fairness shifts as you scale up.</blockquote>

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