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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4667640" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 94: February 1985 part 1/3100 pages. Oh, now this is one of the most iconic cover pictures ever. Near photographic levels of detail, plus hawtness & cuteness without being excessively cheesy and impractical = epic win. This is one that gets reprinted several times, and deservedly so. We also get an editorial which hints that they may be increasing their coverage of non TSR games further in the near future, as Greg Stafford asks about the viability of putting runequest stuff in. And to top it all off we're getting our second Creature Catalog (not left out this time. ) This seems very promising indeed.   Can they keep this run of awesome issues up? I look forward to seeing. <img src="http://paizo.com/image/product/magazine_issue/dragon/94/cover_500.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />In this issue:Letters: Once again, their failure to properly centre a module leads to complaints. They try, honestly they do. But when you have deadlines to meet and stuff being changed around up to the last minute, it can't be helped. Two letters asking for more ettin education. Multi-limbed creatures are better able to survive the loss of some of their parts than humans would under the same situation. Sealing off is useful.A letter asking how the dwarves in Gladsheim can be magic-users. The answer is of course, because NPC's are not bound to the rules PC's are. Norse myth has tons of dwarvish enchanters. We need to break the rules to properly emulate that. No, you cannot do the same. The forum: Kurt G Barringhaus thinks that D&D really ought to have a wound penalty system. Will that make the game more fun? Good question. But it'll certainly increase realism. Tim Nye thinks that dwarves should be heavier than Stephern Innis does. They need to be bulky, because otherwise they have a combat disadvantage that does not combine well with their favoured class. However, halflings should suck at grappling. Ho hum. Katharine Kerr continues to believe that playing evil characters is unhealthy behaviour indicative of some underlying problem with the players personality. Yes, you, Christopher Kopec and Scott Hicks. : points finger: Why do you enjoy pretending to do nasty things? What's the source of your mental damage, huh? Dear oh dear. We expect this stuff from Gary, but still, this is not the way to garner respect. I'm very disappointed in you. Steve Pajak has his own variant system for determining success in ability rolls, and would like to share it with us. Thanks for that. Everyone loves a good variant rule. Ralph Sizer also has thoughts about using ability rolls as a catchall. Remember that different tasks have different difficulties. By using % and a mutiplier to your score based on hardness, you have a situation where even incompetent characters have a chance, albeit a slim one. Roy Cozier thinks that the magazine should be in no danger from the Tolkien estate for using the name Dwalin, because that name was taken from the Elder Edda in the first place. Ha. If a corporation wants to be an <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> and has way more money to throw at the problem than you, technicalities like that will not protect you. Gary A Nelson reminds us that bats are not blind, they actually have pretty good eyesight. Silly folkloric sayings, spreading misinformation. A lot of the time the ancients didn't have a clue what they were talking about. From the sorceror's scroll: Having seriously added to druids last issue, Gary now gives the ranger a nice little extra. An entire new system for tracking, taking into account level and lots of situational modifiers. Which may be an increase in complexity, but sorely needed in this case, and not a huge increase in time taken to use. An expansion to the creatures that qualify for giant class bonuses, since several new monster manuals have come out since the corebook. And just so it isn't all bonuses, a slight restriction on weapon proficencies.  Two of these changes would become standard in 2nd edition. Oh, the power he has. I guess these ones all make sense. But they're certainly not as spectacular as the druid ones. Once again the primary spellcasters wind up seriously overshadowing everyone else at high levels. At this point, that problem seems insoluble. Guess it comes with the territory. You play AD&D, that's the way it's gotta be. An army travels on its stomach: Katharine Kerr contributes another extensive article on realism, logistics, and how to achieve big results in a relatively realistic way. Feeding armies is a nightmare. Travel goes substantially slower than a small group can manage. Roads in medieval places suck. Look after your animals. A rather grim article that exists largely to remind you to throw lots of obstacles in your players way, should they decide to do anything big. Someone definitely prefers their fantasy with quite a bit of grit in it. This could definitely have been done in a far more positive manner. You need to talk about how you overcome the obstacles, as well as what they are. Otherwise it's just a dampener on our adventuring spirit. Definitely not very pleasing contributions by her this month. Same dice, different odds: Statistics! Doncha just love them. :crickets chirping: Just me then? Straight distributions, bell curves, normal distributions with standard deviation, exploding results, exponential decay curves, and lots of combinations. With a bit of creative application of modifiers, you can solve problems that plague designers through the ages. The classic problem of over lethal housecats can be fixed by rolling two dice and dividing one by the other, allowing for a tiny average, with the possibility of a substantial hit still there. Similarly, things like rockslides are better modeled with this kind of roll on a larger scale. A clever idea, and one I don't remember many games doing. Is basic division really too hard for people? This is definitely an idea I intend to incorporate, as it seems so obvious, yet so little used. Allowing for longshots like this increases the swinginess of the game. And that makes for more drama, which is generally a good thing. Another abandoned gem I'm pleased to have unearthed. Reptiliad attack wins big: Our final bit of photography from the cons last year is a full scale diorama with tons of stuff going on. Unfortunately, once again, their photographic techniques do not work very well at capturing fine detail on such as small scale. Ur technology, it needs improving naow. Sigh. The ecology of the chimera: Elminster gets into the ecology business. Well, if he hangs around with Ed that much, it's not surprised he gets roped in. This talks about not only the chimera, but also it's abominable relations, such as the Gorgimera and the Thessalmera, which take the idea of hybridisation several steps further still, with results as ridiculous looking as they are terrifying. This is another case where Ed really doesn't write enough to satisfy. Each of these creatures could easily fill several pages, but instead, they're all crammed together in only two. You had the chance to really elaborate on the hybridisation process, how it happened, and possibly even formulas for splicing together other creatures, which would provide endless hours of fun. A definite wasted opportunity compared to the things my imagination conjured up when I saw the title. Even our top writer can't hit a home run every time, unfortunately.</blockquote>

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