Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4710198" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 103: November 1985part 1/3100 pages. Well, the price increases are back. From febuary onwards, issues will cost $3.50. The cost of everything else in their catalog is also going up next year. Buy lots of stuff for christmas, before the increases hit. (We still need to get ourselves out of debt, even after the runaway success of UA, but we're not going to actually say that. We're not beggars like palladium) So lets hope they continue to produce stuff that's worth the price. Once again their contents page looks a little sparse, which isn't promising. They really ought to do something about that. All it takes is a little formatting control and info on their regular columns. In this issue:Letters: A letter asking if you can still get photocopies of individual articles from the magazine. You can, but only if you're an RPGA member. Poor overworked Penny Petticord just can't handle everyone's requests. A question about how holy flail works. This is the kind of one that really belongs in sage advice. I miss that. When will it be back. Another rules question. Why are automatons so expensive. So you can't mass produce them, just like all the other magically created creatures. They need to be kept extortionately expensive so wizards can't alter the everyday food production setup and advance technology beyond pseudomedieval. Bleh. The forum: David Gaw thinks the most important thing for a DM is fairness. As long as you stay fair, the players should respect your authority. In a perfect world, maybe. Unfortunately, we don't live in a perfect world. No one DMing style is going to fit all players. Thomas E Wolff is one of those people who thinks fudging is a bad idea. Sure, you do it once, thinking it's harmless, but before you know it, your players have no fear of death at all, and the campaign loses all it's drama. Stay off that slippery slope. If the dice say you die, you die. Brian Hook doesn't like the idea of mass combat systems, feeling it destroys your roleplaying and personal relationship with your PC's. Just abstract it away. Pah. Richard Silva thinks that Frank Mentzer has dramatically exaggerated the lethality of a huge dragon when faced with a full team of properly equipped 25th level characters. Frankly, by his math, they would mop the floor with it if they were played with any intelligence at all. That's the rub, isn't it. At high levels, it becomes so much about how well you apply your powers as well as the straight numbers. Given how much choice both sides would have in spells and attacks, you could play this one dozens of times with very different results. From the sorceror's scroll: Now UA is out, it's time for your esteemed writers here at TSR to start seriously considering a second edition. Of course, it will take us several years to figure out exactly what to change and how, and write it up properly, based upon the feedback of our gentle readers, so do not worry. Your views will be crucial in its shaping, and you will receive plenty of warning as to its release, so you can prepare your campaigns accordingly. Let me elucidate as too the current plans. Assassins go byebye (my oh my). Bards become an ordinary class again. Mystic, savant and jester to be introduced as new official classes. Classes from UA and OA to be put in the players handbook. Deities to be more powerful and less firmly defined. More difference between clerics based upon god worshipped. Legends & Lore to be considered one of the corebooks. Now, how do we do this without making the books too damn big for casual players? As ever, this is very interesting, particularly when you compare it with what actually happened. Some of this came to pass, some didn't, and some retained the basic intention, but the details got changed along the way. Definitely one for the historical perspective files and citing in flame wars and wikipedia.  Also interesting to note that the 2nd edition would probably have been out a year or two sooner, had the crisis of leadership not happened. The massive gaps between the early editions may not have been entirely intentional. Arcana update, part 1: Errata, errata. Serve it up on a platter. Use it to make the next printing better. Yes, not only was it flimsily made, UA was an exceedingly errata-ridden book, and it seems that TSR's Loyal Readers wasted no time in sending letters to the company pointing this out, with various degrees of added vitriol. So we have four pages of various clarifications and corrections. Somewhere between amusing and tiresome to read in retrospect, this was of course Serious Business at the time. Question is, is this extra publicity for the book a good or bad thing? I'm betting bad. It'd certainly weaken my trust in a company, finding out they'd produced shoddy goods. As ever, the opinions of anyone who was there at the time on this matter would be very welcome.  Palladium fantasy goes on the high seas.All about krynn's gnomes: Great. Tinker gnomes. Comedy relief race number three of Dragonlance. Stop talking when I am, the rest of us can't speak and listen at the same time. (now that is a useful special power. Screw mining, super accurate throwing and infravision, I want to be able to talk constantly and parallel process multiple conversations in my head at the same time.) These guys are actually reasonably cool, differing from humanity in such a way that doesn't prevent them from each having individual personalities, and being far more distinctive than generic gnomes. But the comic relief incompetence elements are laid on pretty thick. Still, if I had to choose between the three so far, I'd take these guys. Unfortunately, it seems that my earlier hope that we'd also get articles on the non comedy relief races is not to be granted, as this is the last in the series. Once more, their editorial direction seems to be slipping away from me, as they fail to cover stuff that seems obvious. This is most annoying. I wanted to like dragonlance back in the day, I really did, but they just kept making mistakes like this. So frustrating. A samurai riding a foo dog attacking a ninja. That's .... certainly an iconic, if stereotyped image to advertise oriental adventures with. Is there such a thing as being too obvious in your adverts? I'm gonna go out on a limb and say yes. Games workshop advertises two modules for different games on the same page, and confuses me. How very irritating. A dozen domestic dogs: Having given us wild canines last issue, Stephen Innis now turns his attention to tame breeds. Thankfully, he doesn't try and give individual stats to every one, instead giving us a nice matrix of size and role that should handle everything from toy poodle to rotweiler, plus some more specific notes on dogs bred and trained to fill a function. This is an oasis of calm compared to the last few articles, being completely disconnected to the larger arc of D&D's history. And steve is as reliable as ever in producing stuff that is both mechanically sound and properly researched. The magazine would be a worse product without him.</blockquote>

Verification