(un)reason
Legend
Dragon Magazine Issue 228: April 1996
part 5/8
Dungeon Mastery: A random adventure generator? Yay. That's an invaluable addition to my …… wait, what's this? Some guy they met in a bar? Deliver a singing telegram? A plague of rabid ferrets. This is another april fool article isn't it. Bugger. Just when I was getting excited, you drop that on me. Still, I suppose you could theoretically use the scenarios generated by this, but the odds at least part of them will be stupid is well above 50%. Do you like those odds? I don't think I do.
Forum: Rick Maffei takes up more than half of the forum this month, complaining about how players option subabilities mess up the game, making it far too easy to min-max. This is particularly the case with percentile scores. Yeah, I wasn't a fan of these either.
Roy MacEachern reminds us to have fun, and throw out as many optional rules as you need to make that happen. Another bit of evidence that adventuring is more fun as the underdogs, and you only need a few ideas at a time to really kick ass.
Adam Cole is another person annoyed at the politically correct, modern minded anachronisticness of far too much fantasy these days. The socioeconomic pressures are all different, so it's just not believable. Yeah, worldbuilding is hard work. You've got to really work at creating people and places who's experiences are substantially different from your own.
Michael Garcia thinks that it's not that girls wouldn't be interested in roleplaying, it's just that we're so crap at selling it to them. After all, women buy rather more books in general, and certainly have no less interest in playing let's pretend. Is it the smelly geeks, the emphasis on killing things and taking their stuff, or the heavy math that puts them off?
Tim Gray brings up the old topic of cheating on your dice rolls. Naughty naughty. I think it's spanking time. Other stuff is a matter of taste, but this definitely needs stamping down upon.
What's so funny: Ahh yes, corpsing. A persistent danger in Serious Acting is everybody bursting into giggles when something goes wrong. This can become contagious and turn into a running joke all too easily, making it a nightmare to get a scene completed. Gaming is not immune to this at all. I can personally think of several incidents (they ate the buggered pig!) that just completely shattered the mood of technically serious games, that resulted in everyone going off on a digression that lasted quite some time, before getting back to the plot. So this is sort of an april fools article, but instead of trying to foist jokes upon us, it invites us to think about our own experiences, and thus invokes nostalgia rather than groans. I don't mind this at all.
part 5/8
Dungeon Mastery: A random adventure generator? Yay. That's an invaluable addition to my …… wait, what's this? Some guy they met in a bar? Deliver a singing telegram? A plague of rabid ferrets. This is another april fool article isn't it. Bugger. Just when I was getting excited, you drop that on me. Still, I suppose you could theoretically use the scenarios generated by this, but the odds at least part of them will be stupid is well above 50%. Do you like those odds? I don't think I do.
Forum: Rick Maffei takes up more than half of the forum this month, complaining about how players option subabilities mess up the game, making it far too easy to min-max. This is particularly the case with percentile scores. Yeah, I wasn't a fan of these either.
Roy MacEachern reminds us to have fun, and throw out as many optional rules as you need to make that happen. Another bit of evidence that adventuring is more fun as the underdogs, and you only need a few ideas at a time to really kick ass.
Adam Cole is another person annoyed at the politically correct, modern minded anachronisticness of far too much fantasy these days. The socioeconomic pressures are all different, so it's just not believable. Yeah, worldbuilding is hard work. You've got to really work at creating people and places who's experiences are substantially different from your own.
Michael Garcia thinks that it's not that girls wouldn't be interested in roleplaying, it's just that we're so crap at selling it to them. After all, women buy rather more books in general, and certainly have no less interest in playing let's pretend. Is it the smelly geeks, the emphasis on killing things and taking their stuff, or the heavy math that puts them off?
Tim Gray brings up the old topic of cheating on your dice rolls. Naughty naughty. I think it's spanking time. Other stuff is a matter of taste, but this definitely needs stamping down upon.
What's so funny: Ahh yes, corpsing. A persistent danger in Serious Acting is everybody bursting into giggles when something goes wrong. This can become contagious and turn into a running joke all too easily, making it a nightmare to get a scene completed. Gaming is not immune to this at all. I can personally think of several incidents (they ate the buggered pig!) that just completely shattered the mood of technically serious games, that resulted in everyone going off on a digression that lasted quite some time, before getting back to the plot. So this is sort of an april fools article, but instead of trying to foist jokes upon us, it invites us to think about our own experiences, and thus invokes nostalgia rather than groans. I don't mind this at all.