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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5805689" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 264: October 1999part 2/7Forum's chosen can of worms this month is how you use minis. Amazing how heated people can get over the presence of little bits of lead. Or not, as we'll find out later. Bryan Rantala thinks that accepting payment from the people that set a mission doesn't make you a bad person. Sometimes there's no treasure in it, especially when facing unintelligent monsters, and an adventurer's gotta eat to live. If you can't keep your equipment in good nick, you'll soon lose your life in a pinch. Arnold Arenas suggests a hybrid system combining modular spell preparation and mana points. This looks simple enough, if with the potential for serious overpoweredness. Go play an Erudite. Rob Willey wants clerical and wizardly spell lists merged into one, and consolidated in terms of minor effects, with differences in what you have based on god worshipped or what's in your spellbook. I think you'll like Arcana Evolved. Carl Rossi quotes monty python while saying he doesn't want healing to scale. They can just keep going through ever more ridiculous injuries that will take longer to heal. That could get rather comical. H. Andrew Thompson suggests dividing HP into dodge points and body points, to reflect the two different abilities to cope with damage. Methinks star wars d20 is the variant you desire. Martin Rosenkrantz gives his changes to initiative. It's not fair that spellcasters action times mostly get longer as they go up in level, while fighters get faster. Really? I though that was one of the few balancing factors they had. Michael P. Kellam tells a story of insanely improbable dice rolls. Well, they did ask. Is it their fault no-one else took them up on this one? Dungeoncraft: Having given us the town map, Ray builds outward slowly. Your first map should be small enough that the players can cross it within a week.  Now that's definitely an area where my design differs from his, as my initial maps are rarely smaller than a full country. The other stuff is pretty familiar though. Make sure there's plenty of varieties of terrain, locations to challenge the players with, and some safe places for them to go back too and rest up. Oh, and put some big scary boundaries on the edges of the map in case your players feel like wandering off into undeveloped lands. Yes, this may mean your geography looks oddly square later, once you have developed further out. Hey, if that's a problem Tolkien's maps suffered from, (the area covered by the hobbit looks rather odd once placed into LotR's larger scale map) I'm sure your gameworld can survive it. So this does illustrate the problems with bottom-up design, and the fact that you do have to put boundaries in even if you aren't railroading, just to keep players from either getting bored or killed. Realism can only go so far.</blockquote>

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