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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8708657" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 112: October 1995part 4/5In A Pinch: On the plus side, they are using both the carrot and the stick in encouraging heroic behaviour, as they port the hero points system from the Living Jungle completely unchanged. You know the drill now. Act above and beyond the call of duty and the judge may award one at their discretion. You can spend them before or after the roll. but they give twice as much benefit before. Someone in the office must really like the idea of them, probably someone who will also work on D20 Modern and Star Wars Saga Edition, but not D&D 3e. (They changed so much in that edition change I'm surprised they didn't put them in, not even as an optional rule in the DMG. ) So this is another reminder that the process of game design in D&D is an incremental one with lots of little forks in the path, and various factions within the company wanting to push it in different directions. Bits like this give us some clues as to who was on which side of those arguments.Atmosfear: The GM'ing side of the equation is rather longer than the the player one. Nonweapon proficiencies and At Death's Door rules are mandatory, particularly that second one because there's no-one who can bring you back on Gothic Earth. XP is entirely fiat, just give them the awards listed in the adventures rather than calculating from the precise number of monsters they killed and treasure they found. Anything magical you find will have a certificate, so don't try to cheat on your character sheet or you will face swift bannination. Pay attention to the list of event summaries at the end of adventures, because as they stated earlier, if properly filled out those will affect the long term metaplot by making the choice the majority of groups took the canon one. They are offering some choices though. Weapon speed modifiers and spell casting times are recommended but not mandatory, as are critical hit rules. If they're bogging things down at your table they'll trust you enough to make the judgement call on that. And if PC's do something unexpected, don't be afraid to ad-lib in response in general. It does seem like they're trying to put more faith in the individual players & DM's than the other Living settings. They won't be exploring the depths of human depravity and backstabbing White Wolf players would in a horror setting, but we might actually still get some good roleplaying out of these adventures. Ghost Writing: The writing guidelines also make it clear that they want this to be a more sophisticated kind of campaign. (even though the idea that everyone is part of a secret cabal that assigns half a dozen random agents from around the world to each mission is very 80's cartoon) You still need to fit  an entire adventure into 3+1/2 hours, adventures are sorted by level tiers, and they want you to be ultra conservative with handing out magical items, but they are encouraging you to make things less linear and put mystery, romance, and real historical locations & events in. Go easy on the humour though, particularly the goofy stuff they put in the Living City adventures, as that's not the right tone for this setting at all. That is very welcome to hear. Maybe this will turn out good after all. Let's hope they do get enough submissions to run the kind of campaign they intended, and the player driven metaplot doesn't turn into a mess. I look forward to seeing updates in future issues.</blockquote>

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