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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5776222" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 261: July 1999 part 2/7D-Mail: We start off with two letters of praise for issue 258, in particular Bruce Cordell's man vs machine epic. Yeah, that one's joining the hall of fame alright. Not hard to figure that out. Of course there was also the matter of issue 258's reduced size, which does not go unnoticed either. They're not particularly happy about having to do that either. We need more advertisers! Sales wouldn't hurt either, as the more readers you have, the more advertisers are willing to pay. Of course, there's always someone who has to complain about the slightest pushing of the envelope, and so we get another letter saying they don't want to see technology in their AD&D, or Alternity in their magazine at all. It's quite strange how little variety they want. A bunch of talk about 256's Dungeoncraft, and how names and words form, and are appropriated and bastardised by other languages. This is a topic that whole books have been written about. A magazine article is not going to be able to give an in depth and nuanced coverage of this. And finally, another letter from someone who thinks the magazine has improved quite a bit from the final days of TSR. They're concentrating on what they ought to be concentrating on. Well, that's certainly true, whatever subjective quality analyses might be made. Nodwick passes on his experience to a new generation of henchpeople. Forum: Christopher Record thinks monks and psionicists ought to be part of the same class group, as they both draw from the same power source. We are seeing a surprising number of things that they'll only get round to adopting 2 editions later in here. James Walker reminds us that the DM isn't always right, and letting the players affect your plot in a logical way is more interesting for both sides than railroading. The game is most fun when no-one knows for sure how things are going to turn out. Daniel Chilcott wonders what nonstandard races really means. You ought to have plenty of options for PC's, so you can choose what ones are standard for your world, instead of being stuck in tolkien rip-off land again. Pierrr Van Rooden thinks that priests and bards are actually the most powerful classes at the moment. They're certainly the most flexible. We've had plenty of arguments about this one before. Clyde A. Starr Jr has suggestions for the rules that would result in the books being absolutely massive. We can't compile everything good about the last edition into the corebooks. Jack Pitsker thinks that healing ought to scale with level, otherwise characters actually take longer to get back to full health as they advance. Very good point, whether HP are a reflection of toughness or cool, it makes more sense for them to replenish in proportional amounts. Dungeoncraft: Ray finally can't put off making a map any longer. But before he does, he takes another lesson from the old modules and brings it up to date. Rumours! After all, it's good enough for the caves of chaos. Having a good dozen or two rumours, some of them false, some true, means your players have a ton of incentive to stick around the general area of their home base until they're used up. And having red herrings and active lies being spread by people makes the world seem bigger, not just a backdrop to whatever story the DM wants to tell, that'll reveal just whitespace if you go off the path. I approve. The mapping advice, on the other hand, is fairly typical. Make it useful, visually distinctive, and give the things within it logical placements. And make sure the number of NPC's statted up correlates with the number of buildings in a sensible fashion. The kind of basic checklist that of course many published modules ignore freely, and indeed, you can probably get away with missing out several of the elements in this one, as long as you make sure the ones you do include are good. So really, despite Ray saying you shouldn't do more work than you need to, following every single step in his columns will result in a bit of overkill. Just do as much as you can in the time you have available. We are making progress, but it's obvious now Ray's in for the long haul, and'll be giving out new bits of information accordingly.</blockquote>

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