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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8972917" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron UK Issue 4: March 1999part 4/5MAILbag: First letter thanks them for having a note of cynicism in their survey about the next edition. Of course there's a profit motive there, not just a desire to make the next edition better. Since any significant changes would make the vast number of supplements for the current edition obsolete, he's not in favour of it.Second sends their approval for the recent Call of Cthulhu and Star Wars coverage and wonders if they'd accept a Vampire: the Masquerade adventure. Yes indeed. Send in your White Wolf ideas, they'd love to have them as long as the writing quality is half-decent.Third thinks that with all the players option stuff, they're already halfway to a new edition anyway. They also have a whole bunch of further suggestions, about half of which will be in the next edition. Nearly everyone seems to dislike demihuman class & level restrictions and the arbitrary distinction between dual classing and multiclassing.Fourth is also cynical about the idea of 3e, but accepts that there are some real improvements to be made in the rules and a good streamlining would definitely help bring new blood into the hobby. You've got to get both the marketing and the mechanics right if you really want people to join and then stick around long-term. Can you get the right balance between immediate accessibility and rewarding delving deeper?Finally, we have a humorous letter from the acolytes of the order of John Amos, dedicating themselves to making gaming more fun in his image. Since religion is inherently silly why not start with the silliness forefront, as the church of the flying spaghetti monster would agree.A Simple Pickup pt 2: The Star Wars adventure concludes with another fairly linear sequence of encounters. Trying to leave the jungle, you get stopped by a large quantity of Twi'leks, with a setup that makes it obvious you have to go along with them or face certain death. Presuming the players aren't so thick-headed that they ignore the clue bat, they'll find that the Twi'leks don't want to kill them, but they would like some assistance in destroying the still under construction Empire base. From that point, you do get some freedom in discussing tactics, although they'll still expect you to do the main work of actually going into the base and sabotaging things while they hang back and ambush anyone who flees into the jungle. Essentially, this turns into the second half of Return of the Jedi, only with Twi'leks replacing Ewoks as the cunning but technologically lacking natives needing a little help to deal with the encroaching empire forces. So this is pretty formulaic, but sticking close to the kind of things that have already happened in the movies does at least make it feel pretty star warsish. If you play a game to experience similar events to the source material you could do a lot worse, but you could also do better as well. Overall, about medium quality for a tournament adventure.The Perfect Call of Cthulhu Investigation: Perfect as in fun for the players that is. Like many a game, there's a gulf between the way the rulebook says a game should go and how it usually does when put up against a bunch of irreverent monty python quoting players. Sure you have all these stress, madness and humanity scores that are supposed to measure how traumatised characters are by the things they encounter and the hard choices they have to make, but as often as not they'll solve things with large quantities of explosives and a silly quip then go home for schwarma or whatever else would be period appropriate. Any casualties will be quickly replaced by an advert for new redshirts who will turn out to be suspiciously similar in competency and personality to the fallen. A particularly british bit of self-aware whimsy, contrasting with the kind of jokes they put in the american edition, this all makes perfect sense to me and my own brand of cynicism. I'd have no objection to seeing more of it.</blockquote>

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