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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8782448" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 120: June 1996part 5/5The Lord Mayor needs You!: Unsurprisingly, it looks like the big climax of the war plotline will be taking place at Gen Con in a few months. Get ready for another mass battle on an enormous scenery-filled table that you couldn't replicate at home unless you live in a mansion. Like the elections, this becomes an excuse to soak up all your PC's cash reserves if they participate, as your ability to field units in the battle requires that you not only buy official units from their Ral Partha Battlesystem™ line OOC, paint it properly yourself, (no gray randos allowed in this establishment, we'd wind up losing track of which belonged to who) but pay realistic costs of tens of thousands of GP for each one you field IC. Only the most ultra hardcore of the hardcore tournament-goers will be able to afford more than a peasant levy or a Cormyr militia. Not sure even Melissa Eldaren has the 200,000gp needed to afford an Imperial General. It all requires a very high buy-in, and I'm sure some people will turn up ready to rock but be disqualified because they forgot one of the prerequisites. It once again reinforces the worries in the letters about the RPGA having pay-to-play elements and accessibility problems. Stuff like this is why they're still hovering around the 10,000 member range after 15 years, while many MMO's will manage orders of magnitude more in a fraction of the time, and enable mass battle scenarios in a much faster and smoother way. Unless you have the money & free time to travel to lots of conventions a year, you've got no hope of getting to participate in the more advanced adventures around here, while nearly anyone can grind a few hours a night instead of watching TV and get to the current level cap soon enough. Then once you have more members, network externalities compound the difference in play experience. It's all very frustrating to read about.Notes from JQ (sic): Once again, the editing is really going to pot around here. J is right next to H on a QWERTY keyboard, so I can see how someone typing fast could make that mistake, but not spotting it all the way to publication? Dear oh dear. I guess switching editors does make that sort of thing more likely. Anyway, here's new editor Jeff Quick introducing himself. (which means the title change might be a play on words rather than a mistake, but the fact it's spelled the regular way in the contents page leaves that ambiguous) Unlike the previous few changeovers, he's talking straight away about what he plans to do differently. He's already brought back the letters column, and also wants to do more reviews as well, hopefully even more coverage of non D&D systems if they can get the submissions, while making the newszine somewhat less focussed on conventions. Seems like the letters he picked for the front of the issue were ones he agreed with and was already planning to do something about. Hopefully more people disagree with his idea than disagree, and he'll get the submissions to implement his ideas, but you never know with these things, and he could be gone in a few months like his predecessor anyway. Still, his ideas don't seem too terrible, (although they might push this towards being more of a generic gaming magazine competing directly with Dragon) so I'll give him a fair chance to prove himself.An issue full of good ideas with imperfect implementations, this was another one that was pretty interesting to read, but I wouldn't want to use most of it. It's nice to see them continuing to cover other RPG's after Dragon gave up, but it's also obvious they don't get enough submissions of those to exercise much quality control. On we head, to see if the new faces at the top of the credits can freshen things up a little without making too many rookie mistakes.</blockquote>

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