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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5218310" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 188: December 1992part 1/6124 pages. Speak of the devil. Larry Elmore shows up again this christmas to show us how it's done. And for once, he's not painting the same model <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" /> That's a pleasant change. For christmas, it seems we have another round of roleplaying advice for both GM and player. Do they have any new ideas, or will it be the same old homilies to character building and respecting the feelings of others? I think I need a little something beyond the basics this far in. In this issue:Letters: We get a belated obituary for Fritz Leiber this month. Alas, we knew him well. Fare thee well, old rogue. Your legacy remains every time they run a collection of magical items here. We also get an official confirmation of demise for Top Secret support. The writing has been on the wall for some time though. It managed a good decade of fairly regular articles, but the will just isn't there when the public buy D&D products in several orders of magnitude greater numbers. Bah. Must try harder. A letter complaining about how kid-centric their recent survey was. See, it's not just me suffering from this! Roger admits that their current marketing policy is indeed to catch 'em young, trap them for life. But you do also need to keep exiting players for that to work. A letter from someone who's forgotten who or what the thendar are. This also completely stumps the TSR staff. Fortunately, a simple keyword search allows me to solve this problem in a second. Issue 101, the creature catalog III.  Ennuii ridden astral planar guys with galactus hats. I love modern technology. Editorial: It's been a long time since you could send in an article to the magazine anonymously and have any hope of it getting published. Here we see them getting a little more bureaucratically entrenched and hard for a new writer to break into. Not only do you pretty much have to do the SASE thing if you want to avoid the norkers dressed as ogres eating your hard work, you have to ask them before sending in the article if they're interested. That should be pretty offputting to those of thin skin or short attention span. It may not be the best way to nurture talent, but as long as they can choose from dozens of articles for each one published, they can get away with treating their freelancers like a cattle market. Man, I can't wait for the internet to be adopted by business, at least solve the problem of basic return communications being horribly expensive stuff that we bear the cost for. This is exactly the kind of crap that makes people want to see big businesses taken down a peg or two. That's role, not roll!: Or let's make that cliche a little more overused until everyone's sick of it. And gee, can you guess which side they come down on? It's not the side that kills everything and takes their stuff. Although they do warn you not to overdo the roleplaying, particularly when shopping, this is mostly encouraging you to increase your character's connection to the world, and player immersion. It's all fairly familiar, trying to get you to strike the right balance of danger, challenge, NPC detail, etc etc to make your game fun. And as ever, they can explain the equipment, but you really need to try out the tools and figure out exactly how much of each is ideal for your group and the current situation, because it'll always be a little different each time. So as usual when they get to the system free roleplaying advice, this is useful first time, but not so much for me anymore. Be nice to your referee: And so we move onto some advice for the players. This is largely metagame stuff. Even if the DM is often the adversary within the game, that's all the more reason to treat them with respect IRL. Basic stuff, like showing up on time and calling to apologise if you have to cancel. Paying attention and not digressing into chitchat, reminiscences or mucking around on your laptop. Making sure food is sorted out before the game begins. Having all the relevant details of your character and their current stuff sorted out ready to roll. And generally planning ahead in a round situation while everyone else is going so you don't waste time when it gets to your go. If everyone does considerate stuff like this, your game experience will be both more pleasant, and a lot more will get done. In contrast to the previous article, this is one that is incredibly unambiguous in how to apply it properly, and has some ideas the magazine hasn't aired before. This is definitely one to take to the group and have a good hard talk about if your group isn't quite working as it is. Of course, you may need to kick out one or two of the worst offenders to really make sure the rest take it on board, but that's the kind of discipline you need to keep a group healthy. So yeah, this is a pretty good one. They've redone the basics, now hopefully they can fit some advanced tricks in before the issue's over. Roles for role-players: The idea of a Caller and a Mapmaker are well established in old skool gaming. In a large group where each individual may well get limited screen time, the idea of giving players additional specialised roles to ensure they have something specific and useful to do increasingly seems like a good idea. In addition to the existing two, this article also suggests the idea of having a dedicated timekeeper, to help rounds go smoothly, and story chronicler to make sure everyone can check what went on without the DM doing all the work of writeups. On top of those roles, you can always assign players the role of temporarily playing particular NPC's, particularly when their actual characters are indisposed or the party is split. While short, this is a nicely limit-pushing article that should help you think more about the technical details of how you organise your sessions and ensure all the players are invested and involved in the game. Hopefully the forum'll have a few follow-up ideas for this one, as it definitely a cool one that's over all too soon. Easily the most useful of the articles from this themed section for me, as it isn't covering ideas I've heard already.</blockquote>

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