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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4724813" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 106: February 1986part 2/3Open them, if you dare: Having covered swords, shields, rings, armour, and lots of spellbooks; Ed manages to wheedle from Elminster (with the aid of copious amounts of mountain dew) information on a whole load of magical doors of the Realms. 12 different types, each with their own tricksy (and often amusing) means of inconveniencing people trying to get through them. And without even getting into the cheesy old standby of talking doorknockers either. (Beware the area of David Bowie.) That should not only be useful for your own games, but spark your imagination for ways that you can screw your own players over and keep them properly paranoid. After all, any object could be enchanted to do virtually anything. If you get stuck in a rut, your players'll get bored as well. What items will he turn his diabolical mind too next? Will he ever run out. Hopefully not for a good few years. The ranger redefined: Wilderness lore is a big topic. While rangers as written in the corebook do have some nature related skills, it certainly doesn't adjudicate how they deal with various environmental threats in enough detail for many people. This article gives them a whole new set of skills to make up for that, largely percentile ones that increase by your level by a fixed amount. This is an increase in the classes power, but the author does try and balance this out by requiring additional training times for each extra skill they choose to increase. This will significantly increase the downtime between adventures for you, which may annoy the players of the other PC's, so as a balancing mechanism, I'm not sure it works. This is another case where the game screams for a more standardised skill system and number of slots to devote to various categories, so you have plenty of choices without one character being massively better than another for no reason. OA has recently introduced the idea of nonweapon proficiencies, but they're still using the same slot base as the weapon ones, creating an awkward competition for resources in such a combat focussed game. Still, the  survival guides are out later this year, which will substantially improve on this. The system is definitely developing. Anyway, this is a good idea for an article, but not brilliantly implemented. So it goes. More range for rangers: We had this for fighters recently, in issue 99. Now it's rangers turn to get their list of followers expanded. What are the odds similar articles for the other classes will show up soon. This reduces the variability in the number of followers to make things fairer, smoothes out a number of kinks in the original table, and adds newer creatures from the fiend folio and MMII. It clearly explains why the writer made all the changes he did, which means if you don't agree with the specifics, you have lots of help in changing it further. Now that's definitely something I approve of, like DVD commentary and behind the scenes documentaries. Another one to bookmark and pull out when you reach the appropriate level. The way we really play: Or The story of how I used to be a Monty Haul DM, but grew out of it. The problem is, even once you do, you still have to deal with your current group, who are still twinked out to the nines and used to the game world working like that. If you don't want to throw everything away and start a whole new campaign, how do you fix this? Talk things through, in a sensible and rational way of course. There may be a few complaints, but they'll probably understand, particularly if you do it right and the game does wind up more fun afterwards. An annoying subject, mitigated by the interesting actual play reports, leaving me with mixed feelings about the whole thing. Oh well, we'll see this subject again in various forms. I guess I should be grateful that I'm not hating it every time it comes up. Bad idea, good game?: Ahh, badwrongfun. Was there ever such a tempting thing? This article covers that very tendency, for things that seem implausible or tasteless to actually turn out to be fun precisely because of those quirks. When you break the rules of design, break them good, and find a niche no-one's thought of, and your odds of success are actually better than if you try and compete directly with and established company by copying their formula. After all, they have both an established fanbase, and are more experienced, so even if they didn't do things perfectly on the way up, it's damn hard to unseat them. A lesson you can see again and again, from evolution, to economics, to social dynamics. Learn it well, because it's virtually an axiom of reality. Of course, you may make quite a few mistakes along the way. That's also an inevitable problem with experimenting. But you shouldn't let it stop you. Paranoia, Toon, All my children. All break out from the traditional roleplaying mold, and get looked at here, along with some intriguing supplements from more traditional games. So this is sorta a review piece as well as an article, making you aware of games you might not have been, and what they do. And most importantly, saying to game designers, ok, we don't need another fantasy heartbreaker. What other cool stuff can we do with roleplaying. Just how far can we take this and still make fun games. Which is definitely an attitude I can get behind. A plethora of paladins: Yay! 7 classes in a single go. I do believe that's a new record. And these guys are considerably better done than the set way back in issue 3. They've already covered paladins and anti-paladins. Now the other alignments get their own quirky set of exemplars. Myrikhan (NG) Garath (CG) Lyan (LN) Paramander (N) Fantra (CN) Illrigger (LE) and Arrikhan (NE) They are a fairly varied bunch, with ultra-tanks, versatile gish spellcasters, and sneaky backstabbers amongst them, but being warriors is always their primary focus. Most of them are pretty powerful, but their XP costs are also rather high. If this will keep them perfectly balanced in actual play I very much doubt, but introducing them, be it as PC's or NPC's, will certainly spice things up, introducing new shades of colour into our moral dilemmas. I'd certainly be interested in hearing from anyone who used these at any point, and should I get to play in a pre-3rd ed game again, would definitely consider trying them. (Although to try them all, we'd have to skip the regular classes. How do you suppose that would turn out, a party comprised of a bounty hunter, an incantrix, a sentinel, the revised monk and bard, a witch, and a myrikhan. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> )</blockquote>

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