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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4923500" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 142: February 1989part 1/584 pages (32 page insert missing) So second edition is just a few months away. (while the release of the books may be staggered, it certainly isn't by the length that the 1st edition ones were. ) They want to promote this quite a bit. Unfortunately, whatever twonks scanned the Archive in thought that this wasn't worth preserving for posterity. Which means I can't review it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /> This means that this issue's review should be a relatively short one, and there's no particular theme to the remaining articles. Bah. All we can do is what we can. The rest will have to take care of itself. In this issue:Letters: A letter asking them to repeat their critical hit system article. Roger gives a maybe, with a side order of I disapprove of this idea. We know which side his bread is buttered on. A bit of historical nitpicking. Remember, the number of a century is one higher than the numbers in it, confusingly. Two questions about Moldvay's undead article. One is easily answered, the other is left for you to sort out. Is precalculating xp really that hard for you? A letter pointing out the snafu in snarfquest's numbering system. These things do happen. A letter praising them for doing more roleplaying focussed, system free articles that are useful to all gamers. I think I can get behind that one as well. Forum: Eric Parish is another person who thinks that balance by campaign is a better idea than balance by encounter. If magic-users weren't weak at low level, there'd be a lot more of them. And that would make it much harder to keep the world recognisable. Jason Kasper has a rather dubious suggestion on how to get magic-users through those awkward first few levels. Bloody deus ex machina mentors. I don't approve. Jim Amos thinks that XP for treasure might not be a good idea in all circumstances. Foreshadowing ahoy.  Alan Clark also thinks that there should be means to accumulate XP other than killing and taking of stuff, particularly for the classes which should eschew material things like paladins and monks. Plus it causes fewer economic problems. Robin D Brock also has a strong opinion on the XP for other actions debate, being in favour. This seems to be quite the flavour of the month to debate. S D Anderson returns to the debate he started, to give another fairly well thought out bit of pontification. You ought to make the system encourage characters to excel, not be a bunch of bet-hedging jobsworths. Marc Sanders tackles the thorny subject of demihuman level limits side on, pointing out that being able to advance in multiple classes simultaneously is a huge benefit. Does this balance out the overall limits? Over the course of the campaign, maybe. Timothy Emrick is very much in favour of perception being incorporated into 2nd ed in some form. Oh, if only that article had come a year or so earlier, before most of the stuff was finalized. Things could have been rather different. Ilya Taytslin thinks that level draining undead should stay as they are, so as to keep them genuinely scary. Can't have the PC's getting overconfident, can we? Mike Speca is also being conservative in terms of class changes. Ordinary fighters have a versatility in terms of how they are roleplayed that the various specialists can't match. Hmm. I suspect that once again, they might be trying to prime us for the lack of changes in the next edition. William H Stoddard does some nitpicking over explosive magnitudes, and the recent DC heroes article involving them. There are some serious dropped numbers in the math here.</blockquote>

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