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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5088104" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 170: June 1991part 5/6Stand up and be counted!: Or here's your opportunity to vote for this year's Gamers Choice awards. Act fast, for you have less than a month to get them in. Interestingly, they're purely write-in, rather than having a shortlist of nominees and letting you tick boxes. That should produce interesting results, if probably skewed heavily towards TSR stuff. I wonder if they'll post them up in here afterwards. We'll see in a few months time. Role-playing reviews: Off to revisit Ars Magica this month. Another game that's been selling quite nicely and building up the supplements over the last couple of years. And they are still trying to give the rest of the hobby at least basic attention. Ken certainly seems rather fond of it, so this should provide a decent bit of exposition and promotion for me. The order of hermes provides lots of background expansion for the 13 houses. It also introduces the concept of Twilight, which we'll be seeing again in another RPG about wizards by White Wolf. They're a bunch of morally ambiguous power hungry bastards who are always scheming and betraying each other for personal benefit, which also seems very familiar now, but is a refreshing change to Ken after years of games which have the PC's presented as heroic even if they aren't particularly in practice. No more heroes anymore. Seems like everyone's singing that tune lately. The Tempest is an adventure path for the game that may or may not draw upon the shakespeare play of the same name. It's low on maps, random encounters, and all that solid stuff, and high on plot, NPC characterisations, little clues that pay off down the line, and the kind of adventure arcs that are tricky to pull off without at least a little railroading. Good luck. Covenants of course is useful for both players and DM's. You want to put together a team that's more than just a bunch of disparate power-seekers, this does the job, giving both mechanical assistance, advice and examples. The strength of the fiction is praised, which is no surprise. They know what they want to encourage in their players and are putting in the effort to make it so. Once again plenty of elements that will become incredibly popular in the WoD are already present and invoking nostalgia. The Saga pack is the least interesting of the bunch, basically being just a GM's screen and a bunch of pregen Grog stats for those of you who chew through them like 1st level characters in the tomb of horrors. One for completists mainly. The pitfalls of game mastering: Ahh, another of these. Just the thing for anyone who's just started picking up the magazine. A point by point guide to what NOT to do when DM'ing. Which in a way is easier to figure out and implement than what TO do. Let's run through the list. Neither too generous or too stingy with the challenges and rewards be. Cut the cliches. What's my motivation, maaan? Let the player's choices be meaningful (this gets reiterated in a whole bunch of ways, discouraging railroading, deus ex machinas, cheating, and taking it for granted that they'll make a particular choice. Keep the world consistent and developing, not just some static backdrop for the players. (again, covered from a whole bunch of different angles, including reminding you not to make your NPC's know everything you do, give enough detail for the players to work from, and the players valid choices.) Don't allow the players to metagame, and keep the 4th wall fairly solid in general. IC Goofy humour is also a game killer. Learn the rules, but don't let them rule you. Don't play favourites among your players. Just because you're god of the game, does not mean you can lord it over the players IRL. About 2/3rds of these are mistakes I never even considered making, right from when I started playing. Still, the others are, and if I'd started reading the magazine an issue earlier, then my first few years of gaming might have been somewhat different. So it is a fairly valuable contribution, that's written in a way that makes it's advice easier to follow. (although I still often struggle to find the time and inspiration to do enough worldbuilding, even if I don't make the other mistakes any more) I can't hate on this one, even if much of it is rehashed.</blockquote>

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