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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5164001" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 180: April 1992part 3/6Forum: Adam Lesh deals with the Robin hood problem with roughly the same advice I would have given. You can't expect players to follow the film script, and you can't expect the game to follow the same narrative logic when the rules encourage other options. You can use those stories as inspiration, but don't forget the adaption. Steven Davis would rather like playing gods to be a viable option for adventurers who've reached obscene levels of power. Things might change, but they can still have meaningful challenges. Roll on Nobilis to make that feasible system-wise. Victor Paraschiv thinks that fighters are still crap and not worth playing, especially when you could take a multiclassed demihuman or a paladin instead. Perhaps increasing the XP differential would help? Jake Remley goes back to the violence in roleplaying/TV/music/video games is corrupting our youth stupidity. Roleplaying is far less dangerous than those other media, because it's all in your imagination, and frequently very abstracted. It does not make you more likely to commit real violence. The voyage of the princess ark: From the ridiculous to the epic in this series. The princess ark goes from a country full of french dog-people to one inhabited by english cat-people. Logical, I guess. As this is essentially elizabethan england, everyone is very polite, and their time there is devoid of the usual dramas. However, that's because they're just the B plot this month. The main one is that we get to see what happens when you die in mystara. Raman is killed by the ghost he faced several months ago, and has to find his way out of Limbo. (not the same limbo as the AD&D universe, in another example of them making the two games deliberately different. ) And he makes it just in time. Any longer and he would have been buried. Oh, the tales he has to tell.Unsurprisingly, the rest of the article is devoted to exactly that, opening up another interesting avenue of play. If your team got hit by an unexpected and unwanted TPK, you don't have to stop now. You can just take them to the underworld, where they can search for a way back to the lands of the living, go to their eternal rest, or explore the lands of the dead and try and make a living of sorts there. The various types of undead are dramatically recontextualized, we get an interesting synopsis of the society of the dead, and we have more info on how the sphere of entropy tries to dominate the universe. This is the kind of thing that you should consider carefully if you want to adopt, because it gives answers to big questions that may not be welcome. (curiously, that everyone goes to limbo, and only followers of specific immortals go on to get a nice afterlife, would later be adopted in 3rd ed forgotten realms stuff, and I wasn't too keen on the idea there either. ) But it's certainly interesting, and very gameable. Another great example of just how weird and expansive Mystara has become with it's own built up setting. Your own treasure hunt: Hmm. Another article with a bunch of ideas they've never tackled before. In issue 177 we had a letter about charging to pay. Roger may have come down against the idea there, but his feelings must be more complex than that, otherwise he wouldn't have picked out this article. In it, the writer floats the idea of holding a fundraising event for your gaming group, as if it were a charity or something. The idea that your gaming group should be a formal entity in itself, with books and equipment owned collectively, dues paid for belonging, a fund for expenditures, and written procedures defining where and how you play, and what you need to do to get in (or kick someone out) does seem a bit strange, and it's not something I've come across personally, despite once being in a group that pushed 20 at times. Seems like the kind of thing that would develop when you have to specifically hire out space to game, rather than meeting at someone's house or down the pub. And of course, in schools, where tedious bureaucracy reigns, and the authorities want to keep track of what their students are doing. Most of the article is devoted to the logistics of setting something like this up, including lots of general advice on organising stuff that is applicable to all kinds of tasks. Set clear goals, figure out how to achieve them practically and get the stuff before stating, make sure someone properly co-ordinates things, check as things go on and revise plans accordingly, and since this involves getting other people to give you money, publicity publicity publicity. One of their more interesting diversions into real world matters, and a lot fresher than the stuff on how to be a good writer that pops up every couple of years.  This has certainly been a pleasant eye-opener for me.</blockquote>

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