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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5241093" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 191: March 1993part 3/6Forum is fairly small this month. Erol K Bayburst has an interesting compromise on the mapping precise dimensions problem. Tell them precisely what's going on, but don't let them record it in detail until later. Having a mapmaker draw out each room painstakingly in detail as you get to it will slow down play something fierce. Mark C. Francisco picks apart the problems with the psionic twinkery scenario in even more detail than I did. They are not total gamebreakers, especially when they fail at a critical moment. And social penalties can balance out any level of mechanical advantages! Send a witch-hunt after them! Charles E Borner also goes into considerable detail on this. This is why the DM should make an effort to learn the powers of all their PC's, no matter how obscure a splatbook they come from. That way, they can't put one over you with unfair tricks. Looks like this is going to get a similar treatment to the Jedi problem. The known world Grimoire: Bruce continues to work hard on making the dominion level of D&D play more fleshed out. Having waffled on about economics for a couple of issues, it's a somewhat more interesting subject. Raising armies. People are willing to put up with a little logistics if it means a more epic asskicking or similar spectacle. So let's figure out just how much you can afford to spend on your army, and how big you can make it. As usual, you get what you pay for. You can conscript huge proportions of your able-bodied population, but don't expect them to be loyal or well equipped. This is particularly an issue if you go elsewhere and enslave the natives. Whatever your political system, you still have to pay people according to their talents, or risk revolt. Even theocracies can't make everyone work together purely for the greater glory of god. It's all rather troublesome. Bah, this has got boring again. He really needs to get his groove back, as this is rather tiresome to deal with, and I suspect most players will agree. Fasa give is a rather interesting teaser. What have they got up their sleeves this time? A magical personality: An article I expected to turn up sooner or later. In issue 163 we got advice on the respective power levels of various specialist wizard types. Here we have roleplaying advice for them. Abjurers tend to be cautious and reactive. Conjurers are pack-rats and social butterflys. Diviners are always well prepared, but can wind up stuck as observers. Enchanters are charming but pushy and egotistical. Illusionists are a bunch of liars. Invokers are blunt and impatient. Necromancers are a creepy lot. And Transmuters could be nearly anything, but do tend towards obsessiveness in whatever they do. No great surprises here, since they are stereotypes. You know, you could have also done Elementalists and wild mages, since this isn't a particularly long article. I guess the question becomes if you're going to stick to the stereotypes or buck them. Really, this is a little fillerish. In a lot of worlds, wizards will be rare and obscure enough that the various subdivisions simply won't have room to build up their individual stereotypes. And as many campaign worlds have their unique magical divisions that are much more important than school, (Krynn, Athas, Zakhara) and games other than D&D use completely different magic divisions, it won't be useful that much of the time. It's more an example of just how easily you can build up stereotypes from tiny datasets (see also the various white wolf splats) So it does raise some interesting issues, just not the ones it thinks it does. Does the nature of your abilities really shape your personality that much? Do we really derive stereotypes of a whole group from the first individual of that sort we encounter that easily? Does that reflect well on humanity as a whole? Man, you could do a whole sociology dissertation on this topic. Master of the blade: From personalities of wizards, to the personalities of their created items. This is another interesting and potentially problematic issue, albeit for quite different reasons. If you play them too actively, then they may well really start to bug the PC's. If you don't, they may forget that they are sentient. And if they take your character over, then things really get hairy. There's also the issue that they're usually being created by classes that can't actually use them themselves. So they may well be designed with effects not entirely beneficial for the owner. With a revised system for determining their mental scores, and a good runthrough of the various kinds of purposes these items can have, this is another pretty decent article, with a few ideas that I'd managed to miss. It doesn't completely solve the problems these devices present, but it does help.</blockquote>

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