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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4719153" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 105: January 1986part 1/3100 pages. We have another obituary kicking off the year. Paul Montgomery Crabaugh, one of our regular contributors, and the guy who pretty much single-handedly kept Dragonquest articles in the magazine over the last couple of years, has just died from cancer at the age of 29. He kept gaming right up till the day before he died. Man, what a downer to start the year on. Let us remember him, and the fact that a life can be snuffed out any time, for no reason. Make sure you live before you die, and leave behind things that make the world better. A moments silence, before we get back to the reviewing. In this issue:Letters: A letter asking if there are any half-wild elves or not. Kim rules conservatively. Apparently, they just don't see humans that way, unlike their poncy high and grey elf cousins. A letter asking if Len's Archer class can gain the benefit of weapon specialization. Considering how much Len dislikes it, I'd probably say no, but Kim disagrees, and rules in the affirmative, so they can become even more twinked at shooting stuff. Some questions about Stephin Inniss' dog articles. A letter pointing out that the jumping system in issue 93, and the special one thief-acrobats get are incompatible and produce stupid results when put side by side. Correct. Such is the nature of and problem with arbitrary subsystems developed independently without guidelines. We have said before that it's impossible to incorporate everything this magazine does into a single game. The forum: Cole Langston thinks that solo games are not harder to play than team ones. Ok, you have to be a lot more cautious when it comes to combat, but it makes things easier in other ways, with less keeping track of everything that's happened to everyone, and more room to roleplay. George W Detwiler agrees with Frank Mentzer that a huge dragon is entirely a match for 25th level characters if it plans things right. All it takes is for them to strike first, and they'll be down lots of HP and possibly an annoying status effect. This is the stage where everyone has instadeath tricks. What this needs is extensive double-blind playtesting. For great justice!James Maliszewski thinks that alignment is still important as a part of the game, and should neither be forgotten, nor played stupidly. Another pretty noncontroversial statement, unless you don't like the idea of alignment at all. Leomund's tiny hut is once again in a nerfing mood. This time, len turns his eye to demihumans. Wild elves, Duergar, Svirfneblin and Drow are all rather more powerful than the regular PC races. This is indeed a problem. Fortunately, they have technology that works reasonably well now. XP penalties! Ok, they still won't be truly balanced, given their various level limits, and the fact that racial abilities tend to become less significant at higher level, but it's a step in the right direction. Just need to apply it with a little more finesse. The usual problem then. Travel works both ways: Seems like random tables are on the rise again. How curious. This one is full of people and things you may run across going the other way while you're on the road. After all, it's not all monsters, and you can't just make something up off the top of your head any time a humans result comes up. This could just allow you to add a little extra flavour to your game, or it could spin off entirely new unexpected encounters. Taxmen! Nobles! Famous entertainers! A pretty good way to kick off the issue, with plenty of detail, including historical stuff. If you're playing pseudomedieval, this won't hurt at all if you don't have every detail of your campaign planned out. Seeing is believing: Ahh, invisibility. A fantasy staple, being central to the biggest book in D&D's sources, and having plenty of mythical antecedents. But players being players, they have to ask how it works, and then start picking things apart further as a result of that answer. So this is ripe ground for an article, and I'm vaguely surprised we haven't seen one before. We start off with a description of the three different ways that things can be made unseen in D&D, with examinations of the quirks of each. We then go into a sage advice style Q&A, before introducing 2 new spells making the various types of invisibility more accessable. This switches from format to format at great speed, keeping me interested and proving that while this is a new writer, he's a pretty versatile one. This is how you handle examination of rules without boring people, and helping them make their game better as a result of the knowledge. Remember, after examining theory, you've got to be able to apply it. If it doesn't have a practical result and profit from using it, it might as well just be philosophy, which is no use at all to us. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> The rest of the papers: Errata and supplementary material for the centaur papers. As this is largely about weights and level limits, it's not anything you'd miss if they didn't put it in, unless you wanted them as a PC. They seem to be doing a lot of this stuff recently. Editorial crap. This is what happens when you rush release lots of big books. Much mehness.</blockquote>

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