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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4812811" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 123: July 1987 part 1/5108 pages. Ooh, shirtlessness. A little cheesecake for our female readers this time round. See what you get if you turn the flames up a bit. They also continue their drive to have more themed issues, with wizards getting another bite at the apple. Will this give us a nice selection of roleplaying advice and spells? Or does forbidden knowledge lurk within these eldrich pages, waiting to destroy your gameworld with it's twinkedness? Guess you'll just have to watch me, as I turn the pages and read the contents, see if this degenerates into the incoherent scrawls of a madman. In this issue:Letters: Another request for big prints of the magazine's covers. It's all up to the individual artists, really. But they are happy to facilitate this process. A letter complaining that nearly all the articles in the magazine are for AD&D rather than regular D&D. This sucks. Roger quite agrees. Send them in! Not that it matters much, given how cross-compatible the games are. A letter from someone afraid that the start of the forgotten realms means oerth and krynn won't get any more stuff. Roger assures them that that is not the case. And even if it was, you don't have to play nothing but modules. Surely the worlds are now fleshed out enough for you to build your own adventures in them?Forum is rather large again this month. The flames about sexism and oriental stuff rage intensely, often combined. Double the nerdrage, double the fun! Nathan Perkins points out that everyone taking the min-max choices results in parties with exploitable weaknesses. And even with double specialization, fighters still aren't really balanced with wizards. So if your players are munchkins, don't be afraid to play rough in response. Eric Krein does some analysis of wizard's spellbooks, in a piece that's almost big enough to be turned into an actual article. Cost, capacity, size and durability, they ought to be awkward choices, not no-brainers. This needs some fixing. Alan Ristow tells us that Banded mail is not a real type of armour. It never existed! Banish it from your games! Ahh, the joys of the Historical Accuracy crew. Really, it's no great loss, is it? Steven Van Veen is entirely in favour of people videoing their games, and has some sadistic ideas for dealing with people who keep messing around during the game, slowing everyone else up. I like the cut of your jib. Tommy Sronce points out that D&D is intentionally unrealistic in many ways. By trying to make it more so, you make it less fun. Go play runequest or something if you want characters who develop in a realistic fashion.  Leung Chi Kong thinks that ships in the D&D world would evolve quite differently, with spells and no gunpowder altering the tactical considerations considerably. Modern ship designs would not make a good example. Yet another case where we really need a full article to help fit things to the physics of the game universe. Uriah Blatherwick is not happy with the onslaught of new rules in recent books and articles. The writers ought to do more optional stuff, rather than forcing us to change our game. Or at least make it more clear that the new rules are optional. Another case of the more things change, the more they stay the same. Adam Dray reminds us that a good person is hardly good if they take the selfish path and sell out their friends whenever the going gets tough. If they do, then they're just a neutral person who likes to think of themselves as good, not the real deal, and shouldn't keep their special powers if they're a paladin or ranger. T Fujiwara viciously attacks Jeff Klein's statement that women warriors have no place in an oriental campaign, with extensive mythological and historical citations. And even if that were not the case, D&D is supposed to be about exceptional heroes. If you can't do a little bucking of societies expectations, you're hardly a hero, are you?  Derek Ho also disagrees about the female samurai thing, pointing out the story of Fa Mook Lan (aka Mulan. Ahh, disney disney disney. Completely mutilating classic tales since 1932) Genderbending is another perfectly valid way of becoming a hero.  Pat Pitcavage is also against sexism. Use your imagination, people. Is it really that hard to come up with good reasons why there would be female warriors in a fantasy game? Richard Silva returns to the forum, also presenting examples of famous female martial artists and their exploits. If anything, oriental cultures were less sexist in medieval periods than western ones. How will Jeff come back from this roasting? Jeremy Sacco rails against the stereotyping of 14 year old boys as crude, sex-obsessed hack and slashers. You protest against discrimination against women by stereotyping and putting down another group. Charming. I find this very amusing indeed. D Laslie Millitello is amazed such a big deal is made about people's gender, both in and out of the game. She's always been playing in a pretty mixed group, and the gender stereotypes definitely do not apply to them. Some people have all the luck. Michael Estus is annoyed that no-one ever discusses Top Secret in the forum. Ok then. Perfectly reasonable. What would you like us to say about it?</blockquote>

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