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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5274652" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 195: July 1993part 6/6Up front In charge:  Quite a tricky roleplaying issue. The problem of leadership within the party is one we probably haven't covered enough over the years, with the player/DM adversarial relationship taking the brunt of the heat. But a group without proper organisation and tactics is a group sleepwalking into it's own death, likely to face humiliation at the first group of enemies played smartly. And a group that bickers while in the dungeon and has players wander off to try stuff without knowledge of the rest of the team, or fire off fireballs without checking everyone else's position will practically kill themselves. Thomas Kane well and truly graduates from expanded forumite to full blown writer here, in a piece which combines intelligent writing on social dynamics IC and OOC with rather amusing and all too true to life fiction. A dwarf that talks like Yoda. A gnome that everyone ignores until he gets them in trouble. A wizard who is all too keen to play grand vizier with her companions. And a fighter who likes to think he's in charge, but isn't to hot on the actual ideas. This clearly illustrates quite a few things. The person who most wants to be in charge is often not the best actual leader in terms of ideas and organisation. Listening to your subordinates and letting them feel valued and able to exercise their creativity is vital for keeping them happy. The best plan is a simple one. Beware PvP spilling out into bad feeling amongst the actual players. A very good article here, that even experienced players can learn from. Issues of leadership and hierarchy will be settled informally if you don't pay attention to them, and if you don't know what's going on, it's a lot harder to figure out why things have gone wrong and fix them. Swordplay: Another regular comic starts here. As is often the case, not very impressively, but then, you need time to introduce the cast in strips as small as this. It's been 5 years and Yamara is still only on its third plotline. Man, the monthly serial format has its flaws. Speaking of yamara, she gets a double size episode this issue as we see the trial of Yocchi. And once again ogrek .... er, seems to be about to save the day. Dragonmirth really isn't playing fair, as usual. The team get captured in twilight empire. Hey, that just means they'll be taken straight into the bad guys lair. That should help get things flowing. The four horsemen of the apocalypse come to Rifts. Can you guess what they want to do? Canasta? Opening a milk round? I think not. Through the looking glass: Ahh, joy, the government committees have got involved in the lead bill. We know how long THEY take to get anything done. I swear they're just an excuse for government guys to give well paying jobs to their mates where they do maybe a few hours work a week for months or years. Bleah. And in the meantime, uncertainty is bad for business, so half the companies and stores are phasing out their lead minis anyway. Which means nobody really wins but the lawyers. This like, totally sucks donkey balls Beavis. As usual, the minis are less interesting than the drama. Several knights from Pendragon. The real differences are in the personality. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> A 12 piece green dragon that'll be a real pain in the butt to assemble. King Arthur, his sword & horse, perfect for a bit more pendragon tie-in. A young and fully grown pair of wyverns. A dragon and her eggs, which are in danger of being nicked. And a full-blown diorama in which a party of dwarves are fighting a dragon. Quite a bit of multi-piece stuff, for some reason. We also get three other reviews on top of that. Dragonfire gets a pretty mediocre review, with incredibly simple and dull rules for experienced wargamers. Legions of Steel does rather better, with a pleasingly consistent (if rather grimdark) aesthetic, and fast and furious rules that may be a little simple, but have plenty of scope for expansion. Study in contrasts of how to do introductory games right or wrong. In addition, he also proves rather fond of the Battletech Recognition cards. They're not actually that expensive, and can speed play quite a bit. I'm surprised how much coverage Battletech is actually getting over the years. I guess it's another of those things that you can skip over when reading casually, but this kind of detailed examination reveals. Man, drizzt really needs to get a better photographer. He looks about 50 here, and that's in human years, not elf years. And would it hurt him to smile a little? At least he's got the eyebrow raising down pat. Yet another mixed bag, with some good articles, but no real consistency, and an increasing number of non-useful promotional columns. The gradual slide into complacency on the part of the playing population continues, much as I and Roger wish it wouldn't. Someone ought to do a reading thread for White Wolf's old magazine or the Rifters, so we can get a more positive slant on this era from the up and comers. I'd quite enjoy vicariously reading that. But for me, it's to the next issue.</blockquote>

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