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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5411986" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 216: April 1995part 4/8The game wizards: Bah. It's the Player's option books. If Unearthed Arcana was AD&D 1.5 edition, this is definitely 2.5. And this is precisely the point where they started to lose me, back in the day. Quite a bit of that can be attributed to this first teaser. Goddamn critical hit tables. We hatses them, and the havoc they inflict upon our painstakingly developed characters, yesss. Get back to Rolemaster where you belong. The fact that all this was presented as optional made me instantly decide that I wanted no part of this, and was going to refuse to buy it, and any further supplements that required the stuff therin. Maybe I'd have chosen differently if they'd teased something else, like the various combat options that give fighters more tactical choice rather than showcasing the bad things that are likely to happen to you. So in my case this was a very definite marketing misstep. Whether this was one of the things that hastened their commercial decline overall I'm not sure, but it can't have had a particularly positive effect on overall sales, and did quite a bit to split the userbase and cause flame wars. So this is another historical turning point I'm not particularly happy to have reached, especially as there's going to be plenty more S&P articles before 3e arrives. Eye of the monitor: Zeb Cook is our sole reviewer this month, trying to maintain links with TSR while also adapting to his computer programmer job. Once again, the job falls to the person who is least busy, quite possibly at the last minute. No back and forth banter this time, I'm afraid. Doom II doesn't do quite as well as the first one. Yes, in technical terms it improves upon it in nearly every aspect, but it's simply not innovative in the same way the first one was. Diminishing returns and all that, just as with SSI's Forgotten realms games. Plus it needs a pretty high end system to run at a decent speed. You'll need to put a few more tricks in Doom 3 to keep the franchise fresh. X-Com is a multilayered strategy game where your job is to defend the earth from alien attacks. This required shifting from a sim style setup where time passes and you have to choose where to position your bases and soldiers, and a tactical stage where you actually fight them off. This means that you have to think long and short term, and while you may be bored waiting months of game time for attacks to happen, you won't regret having taken the extra time to prepare. So it's not for everyone, but those that like taking on all these different roles in one will love it. Rumblings increases in size this month as it has lots of juicy gossip. Dale Donovan is getting a sex change, lycanthropy and alien abductions run rampant through the department, and people are fleeing as chaos sweeps the land. April Fool. Anyway, the hit status of Blood Wars is confirmed. The Jyhad card game, Cyberpunk, and Castle Falkenstein are all getting novel lines. White Wolf is introducing the "masterpiece" HOL to a wider audience. And Steve jackson is combining Lovecraft and Shadowrun with GURPS Cthulhupunk. I don't remember that one at all. What was it like? The Auld Alliance: Arthur Collins has been contributing articles to the magazine for well over a decade. If anyone knows something about persistence, it's him. So I can give plenty of credibility to advice about keeping a gaming group healthy over years of play from his pen. Game with friends and family, instead of meeting up with people you don't see outside gaming, and might not even like much. Don't be flaky, and get rid of those who are. A few stable people are much better for getting things done than a larger group full of people who only show up half the time. Respect each other, ya sonsofbitches! <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=";)" /> Make a regular time for the game and stick to it, regardless of how busy life gets. Trade off leadership, or at least give everyone a defined role so you can work together better. Customise things to fit you. And if things lose their spark, a change is as good as a rest. Sounds good for most kinds of social activity where the socialisation is actually where most of the fun lies. I approve of this message. Theoretical analysis can not compete with real world practical experience.</blockquote>

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