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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5453103" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 221: September 1995part 4/8Eight ways to tame the dark overlord: After several issues in a row where they showed you how to make your villains scary and effective, they remember that just maybe the heroes are supposed to win. How are they going to do that if the villain outclasses the heroes that much? Weak points! Be they psychological, or actual statistical issues, you have to give the players something they can exploit. Or just make them imprisoned, crippled or in another plane, and the real battle is to keep them from being unleashed on the world, because if you face them directly, you've already lost. After all, the only time we ever see Sauron in LotR is briefly via palantir, and he's defeated by exploiting a weak spot rather than direct combat. And if the players do screw up, you can give them at least one second chance by having them captured instead of killed, which we know doesn't work well in D&D. So this is very typical 2nd edition advice encouraging you to put story before mechanics, and if necessary, break the rules to make the story continue to work. A bit awkward really. You're trying to fix problems you made in the first place. Oh if only they could have just not made them in the first place. Role-playing reviews: Players option: Combat and tactics sees Rick skeptical at first, but won over fairly quickly. For the first time in, like, evar, someone is trying to seriously clean up the rules of the game instead of just adding more and more stuff or giving them a cosmetic polish. Attacks of opportunity, weapon groups, a greater emphasis on tactical movement, there's quite a bit of stuff that would make it into the next edition, albeit further cleaned up in a lot of ways. Course, there's also quite a lot of stuff that wouldn't as well, and there's too many options for a group to really use it all at once. It OUGHT to improve your game. Well, yeah. In theory, every supplement you buy ought to improve the game. But in practice, too many choices leads to options paralysis and less gets done. And this is where that point hits for me. Maybe if they'd done it a few years earlier, it wouldn't be such a problem. Once again, there's plenty to speculate about how this could have been done differently and in a less alienating way. As is often the case at the moment, I'm finding it rather frustrating. The ultimate martial artist is for the HERO system. With over a hundred martial arts detailed from around the world, with plenty of research on their details, and how they translate into the system, it is indeed pretty ultimate. On top of that, it has conversion notes for lots of popular systems, including D&D, that'll allow you to add some more MA to them as well. Looks like you can get plenty of bang for your buck from this one. Arms Law is of course for Rolemaster. And equally obviously, It makes skills & powers look quick and simple. Which is of course exactly what it's target audience buy it for. That and the funny bits in the vast critical hit tables, which never seems to get old. If you want your combat complex and brutal, accept no substitute. But since Rick is starting to incline towards lighter games, he doesn't give it as high a mark as the other two.  The role of books: Angel souls and devil hearts by Christopher Golden is a high action vampire thriller, owing as much to James Bond as Dracula. People are coming up with all kinds of different vampire variants these days, and doing well from them. Course, he'll do even better once he moves into playing with other people's worlds, but that's another story for a different time and place. The fearful summons by Denny Martin Flynn is another star trek book that fails to write the existing characters very well. Seems like they have particularly low quality control as franchises go, as they get easily the most complaints on that front. Maybe it's that John is a big fan of the series, and so has high standards for writing the characters properly. Tapestries, edited by Kathy Ice is a Magic:the Gathering anthology that does more to fill in the setting than the novels reviewed a few months ago. It also sees humour start to enter the design. As with most anthologies, there are a few missteps, and the lack of illustrations is a bit curious, but it's still an improvement. Where will WotC take their big moneyspinning property next? The key of the Keplian by Andre Norton & Lyn McConchie feels like it's one of those franchise books where the younger author does most of the work, follows their formula, and then they both reap the rewards. Not that it's bad, but it doesn't seem to add much to the world, and the marketing is somewhat incongruous. Probably not worth bothering with unless you're an established fan. The baker's boy by J V Jones, by contrast, is a first novel that manages to bypass several common fantasy flaws, and be quite distinctive as well. It gets to the point, the worldbuilding has some very amusing touches, and both good and bad guys are human and understandable. And the marketing is similarly quirky and amusing.  Well, a bit of bread with the review copies certainly gets a reviewer's attention, and can hardly be called bribery. A lot of products could benefit from care like that.</blockquote>

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