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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9236303" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 93/152: Jul/Aug 2002part 7/10News from the Top: They lose another long-running staff members this time. Sean Connor has got himself another (probably better paid) day job outside the RPGA. He’s still going to volunteer where possible, but someone else will have to take up the slack. Thankfully Tom Ko has been brought back after being lost during the last round of cost-cutting so they won’t need to start training someone new from scratch. Sometimes it can feel like running in place. They do have more positive news though. After many years of irritation, they’ve finally managed to bring their databases into compliance with both USA and european law, letting them merge the two, which makes a lot of admin easier. Now they just have to hope the politicians don’t pass more laws that don’t understand how computers or the internet work, resulting in more annoying rigamarole trying to maintain compliance and slowing the whole internet down with GDPR popups. Gee, what are the odds. :sighs heavily:Improved Initiative: Prestige classes continue to be one of the most popular new things for 3e designers to add, with an increasing number of variants. There’s the slightly less prestigious Advanced classes, which are mostly designed so you can start them at 4th level. Now they’re also adding Legendary classes, which might or might not have higher mechanical prerequisites than regular ones, but also have story-based ones that force you to actually engage with the setting and complete specific quests to join. In return you’re supposed to make them more powerful in general, but you also can’t gain levels in any other classes until you’ve maxed them out. In practice this may not work out, since the powers they gain don’t scale with your level the way core ones do, which means they may become trivial at higher levels. This is particularly the case for the Witch-Queen, an example one that’s obviously supposed to be a primary spellcaster, yet doesn’t advance your spellcasting progression at all, and offers special abilities that are just plain worse than the 8th & 9th level spells you’re sacrificing. This all feels like a return to the bad kind of kits in 2e, trying to balance mechanical bonuses with story penalties that in practice aren’t penalties at all, merely more opportunities for roleplaying. Not everyone who’s eagerly converted to 3e and started writing for it really understands the math that underpins it, and when they get it wrong, it’s much more of a problem than when everyone was working in completely different ad hoc ways. Another sign that there’s still a lot of experimentation going on in 3e design, not all of which is successful. Good thing we have the charop boards to rip the bad ones apart and warn regular players to steer clear of them.</blockquote>

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