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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4723126" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 106: February 1986part 1/3100 pages. We see the ultimate blonde bimbo adventuress on the cover. The price increase also catches up with us. Neither of which is very pleasing. On the other hand, they're working on using their space more efficiently, which is good. After all, we want to get our moneys worth, and they probably never have enough space for everything they want to include. Will this be an improvement, or is it going to make things worse as they include more crap. Guess I'll just have to keep reading and see. <img src="http://paizo.com/image/product/magazine_issue/dragon/106/cover_500.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />In this issue:Letters: A letter asking where the maps for the adventure in issue 104 are. Buy our other marvel modules! Gotta collect em all. A question about a missing armor class. Ho hum. Some questions about an illegal class combination. Dear oh dear. Are you looking to us to tie together all the disparate articles in our magazine again. It is not going to happen. Please do not ask.Some dumb population demographics questions. You can fit a lot of gnomes in a little mountain. That's the advantage of three-dimensional living. The forum: Bob Kindel is back again, with a whole bunch of comments. He is very much in favour of proper characterization, and has no objection to solo adventures. Hey ho. Charles Ryan ( The same one who would later become one of the head writers for 3rd ed?! Inquiring minds want to know. ) thinks that properly immersing yourself in your character does not come at the expense of action. If you do it right, everything they do will be informed by their experiences, likes and personal tricks, including combat and dungeon-crawling. Not everyone plays metagaming power-maxed monsters, and you wouldn't want them to.  Adam Griffith thinks that gods shouldn't be given stats, so players can't beat them. If they can be beaten, they're not a proper god. Simple enough, I guess. Thomas J Todd believes the game can be fixed by conservative giving out of treasure. Pooooooosibly, for a certain value of conservative. Lawrence Lerner thinks that the amount of time it takes for high level spellcasters to fill up their slots is ridiculous. It could take days! This needs fixing. Only if you see it as a problem. And considering it's one of their big balancing factors, that might not be such a good idea. The laws of magic: How does magic work? Why does it work? Where does the energy to power it come from? Here's a theory. Not a particularly brilliant theory, but a theory nonetheless, and one that allows you to still treat nonmagical things as if they work in this universe. It examines why wizardry, clerical magic and psionics work in different ways, and why different spells are different level for different classes. This is one of those cases where I'm not very enthralled because I've seen plenty of game and book universes with better developed and more interesting rules for why and how magic works. Still, maybe it inspired some of you to develop a better set of magical rules for your own game. If so, then it wasn't a complete waste of time. Casting spells for cash: Ahh yes, one of the most broken parts of D&D's utterly broken economic system. This glosses over that, particularly as there isn't a standardized cost for spellcasting yet, and concentrates more on the way spells can be useful for a place's infrastructure, enabling pseudotechnological advances that move the milieu beyond the medieval. Ho hum. Most of you should already know most of these tricks. If you're going to do this stuff seriously, then magic-users ought to start off in huge amounts of debt, to represent their tuition and spellbook costs. And that may be a bit too much realism for most people. It does introduce a pricing system, but it's ridiculously high, placing wizards for hire out of the range of everyone but really rich nobles. Once again we see that D&D really needs a unionbreaker, so the laws of supply and demand can rebalance everything to a sane set of prices. I am seriously tempted to make that one of the primary conflicts in my campaign world. An irritating article. The ecology of the maedar: One of the stranger bits of AD&D mythology, the male medusa, gets the spotlight on it. They take the inherent tragedy of the medusas life, and make it bearable, compensating for their weakness and providing easy meals and understanding company. Rather sweet, really. (I assume the stupid thing where they only have a 1 in 400 chance of producing another maedar was a 2nd ed addition, as it isn't mentioned here at all) One of the shorter ecology articles, and once again, Ed makes it almost as much about Elminster as it's actual subject, but still an entertaining one. It has some sound tactical advice, and feels like the kind of thing that could actually happen in an actual play. Monsters may be monsters, but they still have feelings and lives when adventurers aren't killing them. And often, they aren't very happy ones. Looks like Ed is on his usual form this month. Money isn't everything: As long as you have enough of it, that is. Which first level characters definitely do not. Looks like it's another economic advice article. If you rolled so badly that you can't even afford what are considered the essentials for your class, what do you do? You can go anyway, hoping and praying you won't die on your first adventure, after which you should have a haul good enough to fill in the gaps (as well as a better idea of what exactly a dungeoneer needs) Or you could get a loan. Wizards need little compared to other classes, so they often have money to spare. Or you could start out in debt to a loan shark, which gives you lots of incentive to get out there and make your fortune fast or die trying, for a kneecapping often offends. You could even take out insurance policies. After all, NPC clerics are expensive, and you don't get to raise dead yourself for quite some time. Having the party all chip in to help each other will massively increase their collective odds of surviving and prospering. As would not getting drunk and frittering your money away on the high life whenever you're back in town, but that's a whole different story) This is definitely some advice that will increase your characters survivability, if possibly at the expense of some of the games flavour. If you enjoy economic manipulation, that may be a good thing. If you'd prefer not to play characters who think in a slightly metagame manner and want to keep things medieval, or would rather gloss over technical details like this which slow the game down, this may not be so pleasing. Still, it does raise some very valid points that are worth considering, to see if you want to apply them to your game. It's certainly a thought-provoking article that points out, then punctures a whole bunch of the games base assumptions, making it easier for you to change them if you don't like them. Battletech gets a very attention grabbing full page ad. Roxxor.</blockquote>

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