Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5058762" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 166: February 1991part 1/6116 pages. Yay! A Sci-fi games special. Haven't had one of those before. Course, for quite a bit of the magazine's lifespan we didn't need one, with the ARES section providing a reliable supply of that stuff every month. And we have had a couple of traveller specific ones. But still, this is a positive step in terms of interaction with the rest of the hobby, so let's enjoy it as I experience it. In this issue:Letters: A letter from an Israeli reader with some language quibbles. Roger gets down in the trenches and quibbles right back at him. Another letter quibbling over the stats of the Griffon. Roger is a bit more magnanimous with this one, but still disputes some of their conclusions. A letter of praise for the Mind of the Vampire article, from someone who rather identifies with them. Roger responds that he's always identified more with Kaiju. <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=":)" /> This could definitely spawn a series of responses as other people say what monsters they feel like/would most like to be. I was a teenage TSR game junkie: This month's editorial is another delegated to Dale. And in it we see them reaffirm their desire to recognize that there's a whole world of games companies out there producing cool stuff, and hopefully give it some support in the magazine. TSR is not the only game in town, nor do we want it to be, for that would get boring. Try them out, broaden your horizons. Dale also talks about the fact that when he was younger, he didn't do this, sticking religiously to TSR products. This actually resonates quite well with my experiences, where for quite a few years, I refused to try other RPG's, on the reasoning that D&D sold the most, so it had to be the best, so what would the point be in trying other ones. (yeah, feel free to point and laugh at younger me. I quite agree. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f631.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":o" title="Eek!    :o"  data-smilie="9"data-shortname=":o" /> ) This is indeed a very positive editorial, and one that bodes well for their output in the near future. Course, we do know now that eventually they'll change their minds on this issue, and become all D&D, all the time, but let's not let it get us down. The Silver age of gaming still has plenty of delights to show us, and I'd like to face at least some of them with an uncynical eye (yeah, not easy, I know.) Wired and ready: Cyberpunk! If anything says early 90's in RPGs, it's this genre. A whole bunch of systems are putting their own spin on this idea, and hopefully one of them is desirable to you. This brings the old worldbuilding and roleplaying advice to the new milieu, helping those of you still unfamiliar to get a good idea of the genre's conventions, and those with a little more experience to hone your DM'ing to a razor edge. Just how dystopian is your world? Is it the government or the corporations that are really in charge? Are there any real heroes out there at all? Yeah, the grimdark meter is running pretty high in this one, which does make it seem amusingly dated. But there is a lot of valuable advice in here, which does help you play in the cyberpunk style, while keeping the players from getting out of hand with superpowered hi-tech combos. Keep the challenges coming, make sure things rarely go as planned, (curse your sudden yet inevitable betrayal, etc etc) and of course all the usual stuff about good descriptions and planning. A fairly good example of it's type, this manages to take the general principles of good DM'ing and make them seem fresh. Tricks of the trade: Hmm. A battletech article about modding your mechs. The writer decides to share his house rules, where he makes minor alterations to a whole bunch of the mechs, mostly to make the crunch better match the descriptions. Course, since this is mostly statistics on a game I'm not familiar with, this is one of those articles that is rather tricky to judge for quality. I think I'll have to just shrug and pass over this one.</blockquote>

Verification