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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5189925" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 183: July 1992part 5/8The marvel-phile: Enough leftovers! Let's cover some characters who are hot off the press. Cerise and Kylun from the Excalibur comic. An extradimensional adventurer, who's still a bit of a mystery. And a mutant who's spent ages in another dimension, and changed quite a lot in the meantime, but still has quite a bit of self-doubt despite his character development. Both get pretty decent history and roleplaying notes, even if their powers are nothing too exceptional. We get to find out a bit more about the Marvel universes many parallel dimensions, and get another good example of how characters can be brought back years after their last appearance. And also how heroic characters can wind up on opposing sides due to misunderstandings. The drama is still going consistently in the UK as well. Forum takes a break from satanicness and goes back to sexism, with a whole batch of letters from female readers on the issue. Still an ongoing problem then. What are we to do with human nature? Can we get on with the genetic engineering please, because merely educational solutions don't seem to be getting the job done. Clarissa Fowler is being highly proactive in attempting to make a community for female gamers. She's also pretty aggressive in pointing out the shortcomings of most rpg books in terms of female appearances and roles. The statistics are quite damning. Stand up and be counted! Burn your chainmail bikinis! Equal time for both pronouns! (you'll like Eden Studios then) The agenda Will move forward. Leslie A. King delivers a Reader, I married him story. Now she's the co-owner of a gaming store. This puts her in a good position to examine the demographics of gaming. It seems that the proportion of girls is increasing at the moment. That may be a case of cause and effect though, as if you're running the shop, it's less likely to be a skuzzpit. Shirl Phelps has the usual horror stories of guys hitting on her or talking over her when she just wants to play the game. She's finally managed to get a drama free regular game going. Stand your ground, make sure the twits get the message politely but firmly. Sarah Brundage thinks there needs to be more games that appeal to a female audience. Going into dungeons and killing stuff does seem like a very male kind of fantasy. Once again we see the limitations that come from the first game having wargaming ancestry and others copying it rather than being inherent in the idea of playing a role. Alan Kellog moves things onto fantasy racism, and how the various races can learn to co-exist, if not trust each other. Just as in the real world, trying to kill the orcs all the time is just too much bother, especially when you can stick them in crap jobs and profit off them for centuries instead. Course, humans do that to their own race as well. Maybe we are the evil ones after all. L. Leon Adrian points out the problems that might occur when a bunch of wizards start selling continual light spells to normal people. The lantern maker's guild will send assassins! Other wizards will start competing, driving prices down. Clerics will decry this violation of the natural order. You know, all of those sound like springboards to more adventures to me. Change and the tensions that result from it are an ideal driver for interesting yet realistic plots. Michael Miller decides to chat about time travel. Unlike our previous forumite, he is in favour of magic being applied in a technological fashion and different eras varying widely. The more variety of places people have to adventure in, the less likely they'll be bored. Jackson Caskey brings up another endless problem, that of cheating twinky players. They change their ability scores between sessions! They metagame relentlessly and throw a strop when you use monsters and magic items in books they don't have! They refuse to treat your carefully written setting as anything more than a flimsy backdrop to their killing and taking of stuff. Bleah. Yeah, that's a problem alright. If they're all like that, just find a new group. Let them enjoy their monty hauling together. John A. Tomkins has a more positive story. To keep his players all involved in his setting and aware of what's going on without endlessly repeating himself, he started making newsletters. This proved so successful that when he moved across the country, his old group still wanted them sent to them so they could keep up with his new adventures and worldbuilding. Now that's a good example of successful player engagement. Christopher Newton encourages you not to be afraid of having your players make big changes in the setting. He also raises the idea of treating your game and creativity as Art. Swine! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />oints finger: Burn him! <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" /> Donna L. Beales talks about her recent spate of gaming funk, and the things that did definitely not work to shake her out of it. All the IC cool toys in the world won't help if you're not getting enough control or spotlight time. Don't forget fun is the first priority.</blockquote>

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