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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5082174" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 169: May 1991part 6/6Sage advice is back to 2 1/2 pages. Nice to see Skip benefiting from the extra page count.What climates is Survival appropriate for (Any terrestrial ones. For underwater or extraplanar, you'll need something else)Do you need to spend a slot to be literate (yes. Note that magical notation is not a part of standard writing, and comes free with class training. Wizards can still be generally illiterate.) How much does a kayak cost. Do you need a proficiency to use it (Hee. You said Kayak. Hyuk hyuk Ryuk ZOMG death note people! )  Do you need a skill for everything? You don't get enough slots! ( Yeah, these rules don't hold up without a decent degree of fiat and common sense to keep them lubricated. This is a strength, not a weakness! Anyone who says otherwise is a filthy rules lawyer, more interested in breaking the game than making it work! We don't want your kind around here. )Can I backstab and apply specialization bonuses. (No. You can't combine abilities from different classes in the same action. It's one or the other. You aren't some filthy 0 level piecemeal character. You're a proud follower in the line of an archetypical skill set and you ought to act like it! ) Can you stack mirror image spells (sure, as long as they're additive, not multiplacative, why not. )I still have questions about magic jar ( We shall have to do something about that spell. Whatever Skip says, it never seems to satisfy them. Why are they so damn attached to their souls and interested in what happens to them if you do various stuff anyway? )How do you use flame arrow (All at once, with great brutality. But really, did you ever take this in place of the standard fireball? )What happens to submerged creatures when you cast mud to rock ( Trappage. You'd better scramble fast, try and get out while it solidifies) Do walls of iron fall over ( Quite easily, apparently. You may want to look at a more eco (and by eco we mean people, for being crushed to death is a very definite environmental hazard) friendly building option. ) Are undead, constructs and other technically nonalive monsters affected by polymorphing (yes, unless their descriptions say otherwise)Do bags of holding generate air when closed (nope. It'll get stuffy soon if you try hiding there. )Why do potions of heroism only work on warriors and 0 level characters (because otherwise they'd be multi-classed, and the calculations would be too bloody complicated. ) What are ranger's prime requisites ( Rather a lot. You ain't getting that XP bonus on method I matey)How do | do ability checks for monsters (don't. Just roll a die and apply common sense. ) How high is a wall of sand (Ridiculously, skyscrapingly high. Um. Has Skip got the length and height mixed up? ) Doesn't 12+12=24 (only when there's nothing else in the equation. Pay attention. )  Dragonmirth offers an interesting solution to D&D economic problems. Yamara has to try and keep her husband under control, and not the other way around. Twilight empire finds an excuse to get the male characters in /skirts/ Kilts. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> Through the looking glass: Like Ken before him, Robert opens up his reviewing techniques to us, for the sake of transparency and dealing with attempts at corruption. It's a small community, and it's amazing how petty people can be. Still,  this shows it's easier to judge minis for objective technical quality and usefulness than it is books, where the value is in the ideas more than it is the object. A model either has flash lines and indistinct details or it doesn't. (although I know that you can get bad batches of a decent figure, just as I've sometimes got books with chunks of pages duplicated or upside down.) And if assembly is required, everyone appreciates instructions that don't look like they were translated from japanese to english by someone from india. Basically, the whole thing reads like a big "back off, buster!" to whichever company was trying to corrupt him into giving them higher marks, pointing out that no amount of bluster will change the fact that their minis have a certain degree of shoddy construction, and the rest of the magazine will back him up on this stance. Which is pretty cool, really. Anyone know which company that actually was? We certainly don't see this stuff in the magazine the way we did in the 70's. After all that drama, the minis reviews are a bit of a letdown really. A bunch of battleships celebrating the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the Bismark. It had a lifespan greater than the Titanic, but it too went down without really fulfilling it's potential. (which is probably a good thing in this case. ) Now you can get models of the various participants in these battles and reenact them. A wizard, an elf knight, and a bunch of cyberpunk samurai return us to fantasy terrains, with barbarians and dwarves providing the muscle for a fairly complete party. Business as usual, with everything getting between 4 and 5 stars. Can't see any companies complaining about that, ironically. Another issue with quite a bit of stuff that's fun, quite a bit of stuff that's useful, and several things that are thought-provoking too. The tension and controversy that marked last year's output seems to be diminishing again, or at least becoming more manageable for them, which leaves them free to actually produce stuff that we both can and want to apply practically. The result is certainly quite nice for me, even if the themed sections are still very hit and miss. If they keep this showing up, their 15th birthday is going to be a good one. I hope they've got some nice presents for this big number.</blockquote>

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