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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5416980" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 217: May 1995part 3/8En-Psycho-Slade-ica: Or How compiling every magical item ever released for D&D into a set of tables drove slade quite quite mad. A sensation I can empathise with pretty well at this point, as the third anniversary of this thread draws ever closer. The sheer quantity of stuff just gets to be more than the human brain can comprehend at some point. To prove this, here's 21 pages of random tables, covering every item in the game via rolling d1000's. A fairly impressive special feature, made less so by the fact that it'll appear in volume 4 as well, so this basically fills up a 6th of the magazine with precycled promotion. So this was cool on first reading, but moderately annoying in retrospect, like so many promotional articles that no longer have any use once you have the actual product. Did you have a shortage of decent stuff to put in the magazine or something? The new colour PHB & DMG get a centrefold spread. Four pages of teasing full of shiny new visuals. Considerably bigger, but not actually much more content. This means they cost more as well. Whether that gives them a bigger profit margin, on the other hand? Surely they weren't expecting to sell as many this time around as when 2e was first released. Eye of the monitor: Looks like it's not just Lester who's rebutted Jay & Dee's review of Space Hulk. Indeed, they've got so many that they decide to give it another shot. They don't change their mind in the end, but that's not the point. The vigorous debate caused is still interesting, and writers do appreciate getting responses to what they write, even if it's not entirely positive. It's only when you're getting more flamers than you can even read that it really starts to bog your life down. SimTower is the latest in the hugely successful sims series. You unlock new features to put in your towers as you go along, which helps give you a sense of accomplishment and keep you playing longer. Controlling your stairs, elevators, and eventually escalators is key to success, which is somewhat amusing. Their main complaint is that you can wind up waiting around for too long to make something happen or get more money in, which means it's best played while multitasking with something else. Nothing wrong with that playstyle. I must admit to doing that while also trying to write these reviews. But I can see why that would stop them from awarding too high a mark. D!Zone is an unauthorised mod for Doom. It basically adds on a ton of mods and new levels, of decidedly dubious quality, and seems to expect anyone using it to be a computer programmer. It's definitely not for anyone but the most hardcore fanatic. Heretic is another one for Doom fans, as it's essentially a fantasy themed Doom heartbreaker, with most weapons obviously analogues of Doom ones, and much the same gameplay. So if you liked that, get this. If not, don't bother. Landstalker also seems fairly typical of it's genre, zelda-esque overhead fantasy adventure with lots of things to kill and puzzles to solve. There's less actual roleplaying than they'd like, but it does what it does well. No groundbreaking classics this month then. The game wizards: Skills & Powers teaser part two. See us try and halfheartedly get in on the GURPS market by implementing point buy. And in the process, make the game considerably easier to break by not being very rigorous with the point cost balancing. As with several of their other rules experiments at this time, this really shows up the fundamental flaws in the system design. Developed in an organic evolutionary fashion, it's pretty good for some things, but exceedingly ill-suited to others. And like trying to tidy a filthy bedroom, a half-done job looks worse than not doing it at all, and just means the original owner now has more trouble finding things. So once again, this reads like a case of cool intentions gone wrong, and implemented poorly. Many of these options are just obviously better than other ones. And the choice between buying new stuff or using the points as one-off drama points to save your ass is very clunky. Given AD&D's advancement rate at higher levels, you're pretty much screwing yourself over if you don't upgrade yourself. Rip it up and start again. Chances are, you'll be wanting to respec characters built like this after a few levels.</blockquote>

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