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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5160182" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 180: April 1992part 1/6128 pages. Welcome to the halfway point of this insane trek through time. Finally I can say, I am at the midnight of my suffering. Though there may be many challenges ahead, there will be a dawn. This kingdom shall know peace again! So proclaim I! We shall slay every dragon, delve every dungeon, roll every polyhedron, and er, drink with every white dwarf! (cue accusations of racism) And the ending shall be glorious! So press onwards with me, stalwart comrades from across the globe! Together we are strong! We shall not fall prey to despondency or insanity! (florble gibber thnorble help me! Or kill me now!) We shall face this april fools issue like we faced the ones before. Deadly seriously! (see page XX for the contract. ) It too shall fall! (god, I'm such a fool) I will not fail! (the betting pool is still open) Let's make it so. In this issue:Letters: No surprise that the letters here again prove that the collective readership have more silliness when combined than the writers. And a lot more wiling to ask questions about sex than they are to answer them. I hope that their parenting skills aren't similarly stilted. They also demonstrate the usual array of stupidly twinked characters, requests to buy stuff, chain letters, non sequiturs, bad crossovers, submissions that haven't a hope of being published, and other stuff that makes you go what is this I don't even. Perhaps it would be more fun if I had a little wharrgarble. WHARRRRRRRRGARRRRRRRRBLE!!!!!! Yeah, I think I feel a little better. And now, thanks to this, I'm imagining whargarble and other such amusing macro effects dubbed onto an oral sex scene. Ceiling cat approves strongly. Editiorial: Hmm, this is a new one from Roger. A clever one too. Just how far can you take the concept of unusual PC's before they become unplayable? You need to be able to fulfil most, and preferably all of a certain checklist. Sentience. Communication. Hands or other environment manipulating capabilities. Movement. Power. Ability to advance. And not being inherently disruptive to the party by nature or needs. Ok, some games make a point of breaking some of those rules and still work, (Traveller, Wraith, Earthbound Demons) but like rules of musical structure, they remain valid as a general thing despite certain songs benefiting from violating them. I remember seeing a checklist very like this in forum threads before, but not in this magazine, which means he may actually be innovating here, and creating something that then spreads to GM advice things in other books. Can anyone trace this to an earlier source? Given the silliness of his recent editorials, this is a surprisingly serious and useful entry. One might suspect him of building things up to make a deliberate play on expectations this month. Still, it continues his efforts to get us to expand our gaming horizons, so it's hardly coming from left-field, especially when you consider his old articles for the magazine before he became the editor. Suspend your disbelief: Oh, here we go with another realism in gaming (or at least, verisimilitude) article. Personality! consistency! believability! These are the great principles with which you must build your game. Ecology! Society! Parsimony! The things in it come from somewhere and must interact with each other! Hmm. Either this is a very dry parody, or just very rehashed indeed. Either way, everything said here has been said before in the magazine, better, and in greater detail previously. Yawn. Not another magical sword: Another person complaining that magical weapons should get more detail so as to make each of them special? That idea in itself is starting to seem rather overdone, ironically. And not reflective of my personal experience either. I don't have names for my half-a dozen guitars, only one of the laptops in my family has a name, and the various electrical appliances that we rely on certainly don't get that kind of sentimental affection. Yeah, they might all have their individual quirks, but this is generally a pain in the butt to work around rather than something to celebrate. Not that making them visually and mechanically distinctive is a bad thing, but there's a lot of other places I could be putting my effort, and I only have so much energy to give. Fortunately, they also provide some nice specific examples as well as the oft-repeated generalities, keeping this from being useless to me. As with last issue, the Greenwood influence is very noticeable. No escaping it these days, with even the other campaign worlds that are consciously trying to be different winding up using the same methods.</blockquote>

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