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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5129941" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 177: January 1992  part 1/6 124 pages. Another year, another special on good game mastering. Y'know, perhaps you ought to have a regular column for this kind of stuff to go with the ones for monsters, magic items and spells. Just a thought. Oh well, on with the show, with another rather nice chess themed cover drawing us in. They do seem to work quite well. Let's hope they grab potential new readers as well. In this issue:Waldenbooks double advertises here with some ridiculously plunging cleavage. She must have disproportionately small nipples to avoid showing even a peek of them.Letters:  As with last month, a single letter about an important topic, and it's rather long reply gets nearly all the space here. Should people be able to charge for DM'img? Roger comes down fairly strongly in the negative. It's fraught with problems, and seems likely to break up a group originally founded on friendship. It's very tricky to sell something when plenty of people are willing to give it away for free. And then there's the legal issues to consider. Making profit off their IP is exactly the kind of thing TSR has to stamp down upon. It's roughly equivalent legally to charging for playing videos to people. Best thing to do is make sure the costs for books, snacks, accommodation, etc are shared amongst the whole group, rather than one person having to bear the whole weight of putting everything together and making gaming a comfortable and enjoyable experience. Too damn right. As someone who winds up in situations where I'm putting all the effort in for very little return from others far too often for my own good, I do increasingly crave and appreciate the company of people who know how to be team players and can have work divided amongst them in a manner that makes them more productive than the sum of their parts. The individual benefits we get from working together are the true value of a society, not the money. Oh, and Waldorf is finally officially dead for good, courtesy of an army of nilbogs. 'Bout time. That was dragged out easily as long as the dwarven beards issue. Will this truly be the end, or will april see him forced to beat this dead horse some more by public demand. Editorial: Or see Roger try and appropriate Kinky for non-sexual purposes, and fail embarrassingly. Like middle aged people trying to spice up their sex life, or one person and their sockpuppets trying to force a meme on 4-chan, this is painful to watch, even as he tries to send a message I fully approve of.  That is: try some weird games once in a while, it'll be much more fun than sticking to D&D all the time. Bunnies & Burrows, Metamorphosis Alpha, Lace & Steel; all break some of the unwritten rules of gaming and are the better for it. But once again, Gah! Major cool roll failure in the delivery. He's gonna feel the bite from that in future issues. An editorial that is highly amusing to read for all the wrong reasons. Keeping the party going: Or how exactly did we get into this adventuring lark anyway? A question every party should have an answer to, but surprisingly many don't. And if members of the party all have different motivations arrived at without consultation, then the chances of the party being torn apart at some point increase dramatically. So this is an article strongly in favour of collaborative group character generation, with lots of examples of social groups that could be binding the party together. Be it family, religion, schooling, destiny or simply the prospect of lots of money, your choice will substantially impact the kind of missions you go on, how the characters will relate to one another, and how the campaign will progress. Another bit of roleplaying advice that seems obvious once you have it. What other figurative wheels of roleplaying design are we still missing? That's progress: This topic, on the other hand, we've seen plenty of, both in articles and the forum. Inventing stuff is a haphazard business, as you need both ideas and the existing materials and infrastructure to implement them. (Take Leonardo da Vinci's designs for helicopters, for example) It's not as simple as just bringing an idea back from the modern day, as you should make absolutely clear to any cheeky players who try it. The physics might not be the same, the materials probably won't be optimal, especially if you're jury rigging something in the middle of a dungeon, and even when you know what you're doing, the first few times are likely to be filled with flubs. Of course, this shows up one of the substantial weaknesses in the AD&D ruleset, forcing adjudication of the success of this kind of idea to be largely handled by DM fiat. And while this article gives you plenty of real world examples, it's not particularly helpful on incorporating them into your game mechanically. Guess they can only take you half the way.</blockquote>

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