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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9206336" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 91/150: Mar/Apr 2002part 12/12Weapons & Combat: This spells out all the rules changes they’ve mentioned earlier in conjunction with the various stats. The differences between vitality and wound damage and when you apply them. Converting existing monsters.  Defence bonus and Armor as DR and how touch attacks interact with that. Action points, for when you want an extra 1d6 to your checks in a pinch. Action types, which are mildly tweaked from the 3.0 version with more emphasis on Reactions. Stats for a whole bunch of guns, which are generally quite a bit higher than the final version, which once again emphasises that this initial design is quite a bit grittier and more lethal than the final version. Last but definitely not least, the rules for remembering encounters with Shadow creatures, which are also not great. A wisdom check, with the number of times you need to succeed also based on your wisdom? That’s just bad math that will likely favor one character in the group over everyone else. You could have at least keyed one part off int and the other off wis, which would result in actual dramatic tradeoffs between character types. I’m starting to think that Bill Slavicsek just isn’t very good at the mathematical part of game design, given how much of this badly needs tweaking to fit the kind of play they say they’re trying to encourage. Venturing into the Shadows: This is very similar to the GMing advice and introductory adventure in the final product, with a few tweaks. A night hag instead of a mummy prince, the mortician being called Armand Strahd rather than the much more generic Armand Wilson. As such I don’t have much to say about it. Unlike the mathy bits it can’t be objectively good or bad so they obviously got less feedback on it and evidently it worked well enough when they ran people through it. Godlike: We finish off this side of the magazine with a particularly classy bit of promotion for the Godlike RPG, (which of course has a d20 version because that’s the focus of the magazine now) showing rather than telling in a monochrome comic book format. Who were the superhumans that fought in WWII, and what happened to them after the fighting ended? What use is indestructibility when no-one’s trying to kill you? I’m sure there are plenty of high-paying industrial jobs, but they won’t be nearly as glamorous as the old days. So this looks like it’ll be aimed firmly at the gritty end of the superhero spectrum, showing how these powers would realistically affect the world and how people would react to the superhumans amongst them. There’s definitely plenty of roleplaying potential in that. An absolute mammoth of an issue filled with stuff that’s both interesting and unusually significant long-term, but at the same time the quality control isn’t that great, particularly on the Polyhedron side. I guess that shows both the good and bad sides to doing development in public. You get a better product long-term, but you have to be willing to take the knocks and actually listen to the feedback in the middle, which means letting go of your ego. Of course, next issue it’s all change and there’s no official Spelljammer book to compare it too, so I’ll have to see how good that is on it’s own merits. Let’s see how on-point their writing and editing manages to be with no second chances.</blockquote>

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