Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8955280" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 133: December 1998part 5/5Living Death Rules of Etiquette: Some more reminders of how proper ladies and gentlemen should act in the 1890's. With no telephones to call ahead and make sure someone is in, you should only engage in formal calls at very specific times of day. When you do, gloves should remain on at all times. Take your table manners seriously, don't eat noisily, stick your knife in your mouth, be rude to the serving staff or stick your elbows out when eating. The strictest rules of all involve interactions between the sexes, formalising the process of courtship and putting all kinds of obstacles in the way in service of ensuring people marry appropriately to their station and only after a proper period of time where the gentleman repeatedly proves his worth to the lady. This may cause problems for female adventurers, particularly ones travelling alone or in a single-sex group. Navigating these social challenges is just as important as fighting the monsters, particularly if creating the right atmosphere is an important part of your campaign. Another short, no-nonsense little article that could lead to hours of amusing/annoying complications in game, particularly if you chase up the full-length source material behind it.Internet 101: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy anticipated (or inspired) a whole lot about today's computer technology. Modern tablets can contain a good terabyte of data and basically do everything it did. Another idea from the series that the internet has been particularly quick to embrace is the babel fish. Grammar might still need a lot of work, but it's easy enough to put a sentence into a typebar and get a literal translation of the words, which is at least comprehensible even if a lot of the idioms will sound clunky or just plain wrong, and intelligibility will diminish further if you translate the phrases through multiple languages and then back to the original one. Another thing the internet makes much easier is looking up exchange rates, letting you track that on the fly in real time and find out what they were at various points in the past. Unlike online video, you only need tiny amounts of data to make things like that work, so they're already fully functioning and rapidly becoming regularly used tools for many people. Another short but fairly interesting reminder of how the internet has grown, and what things were available at that time in history. It's easy enough to see their applications in gaming, particularly if your campaign is based upon the real world. What would have taken hours of painstaking research, dictionary use and transcribing can now be done with a quick copy/paste and a few button clicks. Hopefully that leaves more time to actually do the creative parts of game design.Vote Right! 2: The second instalment of this little series encouraging people to vote in a fair and consistent way goes heavy on discouraging fantasy racism as a metaphor for real life prejudice. You should judge people on their actions in the game, not their real world personal attributes. You also don't have to play a character who's like you all the time, experimenting with being other races and genders, coming to understand their point of view is to be encouraged, particularly in a tournament system where you could be playing a different character with a different group of people every slot and might not get first choice. Instead, you should be judging players on their teamwork, roleplaying, strategic sense, problem-solving and knowledge of the rules. Y'know, the important things in life, not the shape of their ears or whether they can grow a beard or not. Once again, some serious points presented in a lighthearted manner. Let's hope the metaphor isn't too subtle for it's target audience, resulting in people complaining decades later about D&D having suddenly become woke. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />A particularly long and interesting themed section this issue, with more whimsy than we've seen in quite some time. Openly talking about their plans for future ones definitely gives me hope that this is a trend that'll continue for a while. Even the short basic articles are at least on interesting topics. As with Dungeon, this is all much more interesting than the same time period in Dragon. Time to assess the final days of the last millennium again and see what I can make of it.</blockquote>

Verification