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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9091349" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 83: Nov/Dec 2000part 1/6132 pages. In all but the most fantastical of fantasy worlds, dentistry won’t be as good as in the real one and that’s if you can afford it at all. You’d better take care of your smile if you want it to last through both the physical and mental challenges of adventuring. Otherwise you’ll end up in an asylum like the wretch on this issue’s cover and the treatment in those places is not remotely reliable. Let’s find out if you can do any better to help them than the staff, or if the madness will be the kind that makes them more of a danger to you when they do escape and you’ll need to bring them back. Editorial: Just because they’re going back to the dungeon, doesn’t mean it has to be at the expense of personality. If you’re doing it right, you can give the dungeon itself a personality, or at least a theme, as many a CRPG will demonstrate. There’s the undead themed ones. There’s the elemental themed ones. There’s ones devoted to a specific religion or revolving around a particular class. Then once those simple, often repeated themes become stale, you can come up with more subtle and complex personalities for your dungeons and see if the players can still figure out what’s going on. This also has the advantage of making you come up with descriptive detail for the bits that aren’t significant to the plot, so they aren’t instantly suspicious a floor is trapped or a statue is going to come to life just because you mention it in more detail than anything else in the room. Fairly familiar advice, only done in a slightly different way because the game itself has changed, changing it’s context in turn. They’re still an RPG, just one a little more focussed on tactical combat and a little less on extended exploration and ecology. The ability to make open-ended choices and make setting lore significant is still what distinguishes them from a game run by a computer. You’d better keep on satisfying that need if you don’t want them to lose interest and play a game they can pick up and put down any time.Letters: First letter has plenty of praise for them, but also notes the struggles they sometimes have thinking of fresh ways to get PC’s involved with adventures. If you give them a mentor or make them part of an organisation that sends them on missions, you can bypass that whole mess because they have to take the orders and it gives you more regular characters to roleplay with. Much simpler.Second is a deliberately contrasting one that thinks the new look is a big downward step. The move to full colour has come at the expense of cleanness and ease of readability. They’ve had quite a few like that, which is why the most extreme parts of the dungeonpunk revolution faded pretty quickly in subsequent issues. Third praises A Race Against Time highly. The editors are pleased enough by this to give 3e conversion stats for the major characters in it.Fourth is another one who thinks that just because they can make everything full colour now, doesn’t mean they should make every page filled with bright clashing ones. It makes it more difficult to actually use, particularly when you want to photocopy part of it. Fifth also wants to see more substance, less style and more attention paid to maps. If they don’t have a proper scale how are you supposed to use them for your battles?Sixth is another one that thinks that while the rules of the new edition are an improvement, the look is not, and the first two introductory adventures were pretty snooze-worthy. They still have plenty more room to refine things. Seventh says much the same thing but in a more positive way, praising the second two adventures last issue. It’s good to see that they still have plenty of room for politics and noncombat solutions. Eighth is also not keen on the basic dungeoncrawling adventures last issue, and thinks the Robin Hood one felt too generic as well. Only Eye for an Eye was something they’d actually use. Ninth does actually like their new look, and just wishes they’d gone into more detail when creating Nottingham Castle. Finish what you started, instead of leaving it up to us.10th wants them to do single prefab dungeon rooms like Polyhedron used to, as we already have plenty of wilderness side treks. If they can get the submissions, they’ll happily make a regular column out of it. 11th is yet another who thinks the new full colour look is too busy and harder to actually read. They are listening to this feedback and paying attention, honest!Finally, one from future contributor Amber E. Scott, praising the swashbuckling action of Fortune Favors the Dead. It didn’t seem like her cup of tea at first, but in actual play it worked perfectly. It’s often better to try something at least once than just reject it from looking at the cover.</blockquote>

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