Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5054584" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 165: January 1991part 3/6Forum: Carol McGarril has found romance crops up quite naturally in her games, without the GM needing to contrive things. Well, lucky you. The rest of us do not have that luxury and have to really work at these things.  Jason Williams voices his skepticism at some of the tactics deployed in The Enemy at the Gates. Once again the conflicts over exactly how much magic to have in game become an issue. S. D. Anderson has rather harsher words to say about the same article, picking apart flaws in the rules, and pointing out that D&D magic very much favours the attacker. All it takes is one strategically placed fireball to cause mass devastation, and you can't have wizards ready to dispel everywhere in the city. Dirk Waters shows that the idea of reskinning thieves as scouts has been had by more than one group independently. And yeah, this solves them quite a few problems. Funny how big a difference a name change can make. John Stanton Jr has a scattershot collection of gripes and solutions, which I do not find particularly helpful. Bonnie Patterson has a DM who preserves her kender character in the face of recklessness and dickery. The other players may well want to murder them as a result of this, but the game is made more fun. Is this really something you want to tell everyone? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> Robert T. Wahl grumbles about a player who quit because she didn't get any cool new items in the last adventure. He then goes into his own craptacular monty haul experiences. Huge rewards without effort just turn the game into a joke.  Ron Dippel faced the awkward problem of a player who dominated the game to such an extent that the other players tried to kill him, and failed because he was just that twinked. Now that takes a special variety of annoying player to pull off. I suppose that's actually a good benchmark for proving you're a master of mathematical twinkery, since a DM can always beat the players if they really want too. Michael Repka finds that DM's who also have PC's in the same campaign are cheating bastards who use their inside knowledge to twink out horrifically. This is definitely a problem, but he can't get them to stop. No gaming is better than bad gaming, you know. Rick Maffei points out a few of the many ways magic items can be taken away from players if they're becoming a problem. Don't think you have to completely reset the game just because things are getting a little out of hand. Chill gets revamped. You're still not gonna be able to compete when the world of darkness comes a-knockin. The voyage of the princess ark: The princess ark sets off again, once again heading southwest, but not as far this time. They end up in Thothia, Mystara's egypt analogue, where surprise surprise, they face a greater mummy, (technically, a lich, but it's how they present themselves that matters.) who is pissed off at their appropriation of his magic. They win, but the bad guy gets away again, adding to the growing list of people with a serious vendetta against them. Haldemar remains pretty unfazed by this, being more interested in the ramifications for the Ark. Is it really intelligent? Just how would it be upgraded if they use their new discoveries on it. Unfortunately, no time to fix that right now, as it's cliffhanger time again. Gotta keep the story dramatic. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f644.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":rolleyes:" title="Roll eyes    :rolleyes:"  data-smilie="11"data-shortname=":rolleyes:" /> This month's crunch is stats for several more of our regulars. Myojo, the rakasta samurai. Raman, the chief engineer, and his amazing portable magical library. And Lady Abovombe, the ambassador from Cestia who's had a rather tough time of the last 34 years, but has had her youth restored thanks to Haldemar's magic. We see once again that the Ark has a wide range of different level characters adventuring on the same team, and they have a complicated relationship map between them.  Goes to show just what you can do with a party, and still keep it functional. You don't have to use the 4 or 5 characters of roughly equal power model if you don't want to. We also have lots more letters. The usual collection of questions and quibbles. Most notable here is that Bruce reveals that the Rules Cyclopedia is coming. No longer will you have to look up rules between 5 different boxed sets. Plus, it has a whole bunch of extras the originals lack. This is good news. They've certainly kicked this year off well. Lets hope they can keep the momentum up.</blockquote>

Verification