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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5042502" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 163: November 1990part 3/6Forum: Robert Roger shows it's not just D&D that suffers from twinkitude, with his star wars game currently having severe balance problems due to a little too much money going round. Remember, anything players can do, NPC's can too. You just need to turn up the opposition to reflect their capabilities. B. Night offers a load of advice for new players. Is the magazine concentrating too much on stuff for the existing fanbase and becoming too obscure. Not sure I agree with that. Also really don't agree with flaking out because you're just not in the mood. It's hard enough to get a regular group going without "advice" like that. Matt Bogosian also offers a number pointed contribution, this one advice for good DM'ing. Clear Communication of a Consistent Creation is what they can basically be boiled down too. Oh, and variety is important. Allan Roberts points out ways in which characters can fail a mission without dying. That is not the only punishment for losing, you know. Jeff Barnes also thinks that while death should be a big deal, removing resurrection entirely causes more problems than it solves. It'd certainly make the death penalty more acceptable if we knew we could fix mistakes after the fact. Ofed Ofek also considers resurrection not an issue, because the costs involved are more than sufficient to keep you from doing it casually. At low levels, it's frequently easier and more fun to just start a new character anyway. Willis M Burge is also in favour of resurrection, at the right price. Unless they got killed through sheer stupidity, they ought to have a chance to bring their character back. Suicide by DM. Always ought to be an option. Jay Toser points out role-models for paladins from genres other than fantasy. Westerns are particularly good for this. (Let us not forget Murlyand, a canon example of cowboy/paladin crossover from the founding players.) Oh, and he references batman as well, which always gets contentious in the morality stakes. I wonder if anyone'll bite on that bait? The voyage of the princess ark: The Ark enjoys one of it's most dramatic plot reveals yet. They thought they'd escaped the Night Dragon months ago. Now it is revealed that they've been played for fools for a while. Does everyone apart from the ordinary humans know about the hollow world and how to get there? They manage to escape from the hollow world, thanks to the ingenuity of the gnomes, but they are very much not in control of their own destiny at this point. One humiliation follows another, until it ends on a massive cliffhanger. The GM is definitely turning this from a sandbox exploration campaign to a fiaty railroad with great viciousness. Bloody 90's. Lets hope it gets better. This month's crunch is info on Night dragons, both lesser and greater. They're a sneaky and deeply unpleasant bunch, even more than regular dragons, personally serving the immortals of Entropy. This does mean they're vulnerable to undead turning, holy water, etc, so it's not all bad. But they're not an easy fight, with every hit they do having a good chance of putting you out the fight. One of those monsters that would be substantially nerfed in later editions. We also have another extra load of letters, all asking for extra info on various countries. (and the moon) Bruce encourages the writers to be more proactive in filling in the gaps in the Known world. After all, he can't single-handedly build a campaign setting. Prove that basic D&D is as popular as AD&D by sending stuff in yourself. Ahh, the problems that we were going through in that era. This brings them all back. The HERO system introduces Fantasy Hero. Ahh, the joys of generic systems. You do need to show people how to bend them to whatever end. And that means splatbooks. Yay. More money.</blockquote>

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