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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5583753" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 236: December 1996part 4/8Tracking the faith: Ha. A system for mechanically quantifying just how pious you are, and offering mechanical benefits for those with sufficiently high faith scores. Thought I'd see something like this at some point. And amusingly, it's the kind that if you get too high in, your character ascends from this mortal plane, thus "winning" the game and taking them out of play. Not that it'll be particularly easy to get to that point, since you need 256 and can only get 4 per session at most. (not counting martyrdom, which nets you a good 10 <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> ) But still, rewards that really aren't can be an awkward business. And on top of that, it's just as easy to lose them as it is to gain them, which means religious prohibitions will really have some teeth compared to normal games. Overall, I think this is interesting, but will increase the amount of paperwork you have to do tracking gains and losses, so it's only going to justify itself in a game where faith is important. Let's just say religion is a sometimes topic, and leave it at that. Network news: This column is once again all about selling the RPGA. But wheras last time it was trying to persuade you to join by pointing out all the cool stuff, this time it's doing so by reminding us how much it sucks to be an insular group, never knowing just how common geeks are in the rest of the world, or how to replace members when they leave. Essentially applying the stick after last month's carrot, which I do find rather interesting from a marketing point of view. Still, there is a lot to be said for being able to advertise for new players, especially if you want to play a less common game of some kind. And while Dragon long since stopped doing stuff like this, facilitating actual play is pretty much the job of the RPGA, so they're not about to outgrow that anytime soon. So this does seem like negative advertising, but that makes it all the more interesting to read from a bitchy point of view. Yes, many geeks do have social issues, but will reminding us of that like this persuade many people to avail themselves of your services? Very worth thinking about. Wyrms of the north: Well, we finally have a non-chromatic dragon in Ed's wanderings. And hey ho, it's a silver dragon which spends quite a bit of time in human form. Aka a great big paternity lawsuit waiting to happen. <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=";)" /> Not that it's specifically mentioned, and indeed, he has a proper partner, which a little skimming ahead shows is a gold dragon, so it's still interracial sex FTW. Guess Ed is still managing to slip some rather naughty stuff under the radar. Indeed, given all the shapeshifting and identity swapping action that's taking place officially, I would be very surprised if there wasn't some kinky partner swapping taking place at some point. This one is also unusually well connected with a whole bunch of important NPC's of the realms, regularly interacting with and assisting Alustriel in particular. And the tricks they get up too are a perfect example of Ed's mastery of high level tactics. So this one really reminds me how pervy you can get with high level D&D spells & shapeshifting monsters. For that, I have to give it credit.</blockquote>

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