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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4786619" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 118: February 1987part 3/5Fiction: Across the fog-gray sea by Lois Tilton. A delightful tale of incest, genocide, ancestral curses, and secret heirs to the throne, set in a wild, somewhat viking flavoured land somewhere in the polar regions. This is the kind of thing that shows why you shouldn't take half measures when oppressing a country, and keeping slaves of a different ethnicity is a very bad idea. They will resent you, and it will come back to bite your ass sometime in the future, often in a way you don't expect. So a surprisingly unbowdlerised little morality play here. Mature themes do not have to involve gratuitous cheesecake. I approve. Sage advice welcomes Mike Breault onto the team. This month, most of the questions are focused on the Dungeoneers survival guide.The proficiencies system makes no sense. The better you are, the harder it is. (yeah, we made an editing error. Reverse all the modifiers and it'll make sense. )  Does blind-fighting help you fight invisible creatures. (Yes. Are you gonna fill your valuable slots with the fluff skill choices anyway? We'll all be s<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=":)" />ing at you.) Can you fire a bow while riding? ( You can only fire bow from a moving horse if you have the proficiency. That hit and run power is very much worth the investment. )Can a loud noise disrupt the verbal component to a spell (no. Magical energy is  HOP not HAP in D&D. It can hear the components and respond appropriately even if no-one else could unless you're magically silenced.)Can you use hold person to hold a person underwater (No. It only prevents them from moving. They're still bouyant. This may not save them, of course, depending what side of them floats to the top.)  How do I make a bigger map than the blank maps allow.( Photocopy it enlarged and draw new lines between the existing ones. Or buy lots of graph paper. ) What's the cutoff point between shallow and deep descents? (15 degrees. Don't ask us about the level of resonance. I'm a rocket scientist, not a musician.) Aren't grappling hooks too expensive. (what is this, a modern setting? Have you examined our price lists? Oh, alright, just for you, an 80% discount. I'm not going any lower, though.) Isn't it too easy to smash a boat to bits underground (no. Crunch our numbers, I think you'll find them quite reasonable. Underground waterways are risky places. )How do I turn my paladin into a cavalier-paladin if he doesn't fit the requirements or social restrictions. (Don't worry too much about it if you're not playing tournament rules. Gary's left now. You don't have to listen to his pontifications about the one true way to play AD&D anymore. ) Why can't a dwarf pummel a human. (Because they're too short for the basic rules. You'll have to use the expert ones. Shocking sizeism, really.) A hero's reward: Oooh. Hero points. Narrative coolness finally arrives for D&D! You want to be able to make a choice to put some extra effort into a particular roll? Or have divine favour or the luck of heroes, making your game more cinematic. Well, now you can. In typical D&D fashion, they escalate directly with level, so normal mooks aren't much better, but big heroes are considerably more able to influence their fate. However, these ones only let you influence your own fate in terms of boosting numbers or giving enemies penalties, rather than plot twists, dramatic editing, and other cool stuff that later games would do with this concept. Still, even if it's not brilliantly implemented yet, you do usually have to go through rough versions before you get the really cool polished products. Hopefully several aspiring young game designers got their mind expanded by reading this. As ever, if you are one of those people, I'd love to hear from you. Out of the stone age: Hee. Neanderthals. One of the monsters that appears in both basic and advanced D&D, they blur the line between human and nonhuman in a similar way to the demihuman races. Only with the additional weirdness that comes from them maybe having existed at some point in reality. Albeit not in this form, which is packed with weird D&Disms, like using rituals to advance their powers. Still, it's not often we get new PC races specifically for BD&D, so this is a welcome occurrence. Like the barbarian cleric, they balance out badassedness with high XP costs and a whole bunch of social requirements. Since their xp costs and max levels are similar to elves, I think that'll actually work out this time. In any case, this was definitely a fun little article to read. They do seem to be having a lot of those this month.</blockquote>

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