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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9280420" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 95/194: Nov/Dec 2002part 7/10Improved Initiative: The 3e revision formalised quite a few things some DM’s had been doing as house rules for many years. Mike Mearls tries to do it again with the Alert Factor. How does a place change when the PC’s screw up their first attack on a dungeon and now everything is on edge? You just make a simple chart, use this list of modifiers and move it up or down based on the PC’s actions & the amount of time passed. (another good reason to hide in an extradimensional space and recharge all your spells on a regular basis if the mission isn’t time sensitive. ) It may take a bit more effort, particularly when the place is big and you’ve got to do it individually for each of the rooms, but it’ll really add depth to a place, helping you flesh out the personalities of the occupants by making you think about how often they face imminent peril and how they react to it. Definitely the kind of thing I approve of, helping you add more depth to your adventure design in a well organised, if somewhat formulaic way.Mecha Crusade: The giant mecha genre is slightly less niche than battle racing, but is still a very specific one mostly found in Japanese media. As usual, we start off with a system-free intro talking us through the primary influences. Gundam, Robotech, Heavy Gear, certain parts of Power Rangers, these give you a good introduction to the genre and the kind of epic battle scenes you can expect in it. Iron Man shows what happens when you throw a mecha-using character into the melting pot that is superhero comics. You can also use it to play Transformers, which are basically mecha without the human pilots, although balancing human and giant robot characters may be a little tricky. So this reminds us that you can use these rules in more ways than you might initially think. It also makes it clear that unlike the first few minigames, this isn’t a complete game, but skips the basics so they can pack more mecha goodness into their limited page count, so you’ll need the D&D or (preferably) the D20 Modern corebooks to make sense of it. I strongly suspect that will be the default going forward. Some gradual progression in design efficiency as these minigames go on, but the formula remains familiar. Time to see if the specifics are more refined than the previous ones.</blockquote>

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