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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8811810" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 125: November 1996part 1/532 pages. Making a magazine is very much like operating a sausage machine, as you put a little bit of everything through the mincer, including things no-one would eat on their own and serve it up in little bite size packages. Somehow I don't think mixing in a full set of platemail is going to pass health & safety regulations though, no matter how many horses and princesses you cut it with. A particularly amusing bit of metacommentary on their own existence on the cover this issue. Self-aware doesn't always mean good of course, so let's find out how tasty the morsels inside are. your 1nitiative: First letter defends the Living City, and those people who do manage to develop their character's personality and engage in fun roleplaying under it's constraints. They could still change the rules to encourage more roleplaying & less powergaming, but it's definitely not impossible as things stand. Second isn't that keen on all the convention stuff, and thought the new online conventions would be a cool way to get the gaming in without all the annoying aspects of travelling for hours to get there & back. They were then rather irked to find out that the official TSR website only works if you're on AOL. They need to get a properly world wide website working pronto!NEWScene: This column breathes it's last this month, obviously failing to get the external submissions to make it sustainable. Most of it is devoted to the Decathlon results so far, which when compared to last year shows the same slight decline in number of participants as the number of regional co-ordinators and various other metrics. PGCO has the lead, but it's not by a particularly large margin, so there's still plenty of room to come up from behind by blitzing those service categories. Did anyone really have much enthusiasm for this decathlon stuff apart from the staff themselves?The only actual submission is from ohio, and turns out to be your basic "Let us tell you about our characters" one. They had an interesting career where sometimes the dice let them massacre strong opponents, and other times weak ones kicked their asses. They managed to make it to name level before retiring, at which point their low level replacements got slaughtered the week afterwards. When you're used to playing high level, you can forget the degree of sharpness needed to survive through 1st. A Few of Our Favorite Things: This column also runs out of steam here, using up the last of the notes from Gen Con and not getting any reader contributions to keep it going. This time it's editor Keith Strohm, who's definitely less famous than the other two, who's giving us his advice. Establish expectations for the game explicitly rather than just going in blind. This goes double for house rules, don't just spring them on players mid-game and upend their knowledge of how the game works. Once you've established the rules, enforce them consistently. If people persistently refuse to stick to the rules after they've been clearly informed of them, remove them from the game rather than punishing them IC and make sure they know exactly what they did wrong. Sounds like he falls on the more simulationist end of the spectrum, which i have no objection to at all, even if he once again doesn't really get enough room to go into any depth on these opinions.</blockquote>

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