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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5814531" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 265: November 1999part 2/7Nodwick faces his most encumbrance-busting lift yet. Forum: Martin Rosenkrantz tells us a story of how things went horribly wrong for him. Even with a saving throw of 3, that's a 10% chance of failure. It will come up sooner or later. Gordon Dunne wants the house rules of maximum HP at first level and making fighters more interesting implemented. Another case of someone being in luck. Ian Mathers reminds us that the AD&D combat round is abstracted over a whole minute. The difference between a monk's slaps, and a two handed sword swinging is pointless, as each roll still represents many individual attacks in both cases. Garry Stahl has a pretty similar opinion to mine on the subject of deceiving your players. NPC's should lie shamelessly if it suits their personality and goals. David L. Nelson thinks the average soldier ought to be at least a proper 1st level fighter. That'll go a long way towards keeping settlements safe from both adventurers and marauding humanoids. PC's shouldn't be so special. It might help keeping them from getting overconfident. David Pierce thinks that the relative power levels of characters pales in contrast to their player's ingenuity in terms of impact on the game. How many times have we seen complete newbies beat mighty dragons in stories by using their brains? Roy Greenhalgh reminds us that while clerics may be powerful, their god is a big balancing factor. Presuming they're played properly anyway. We've been through this before. Fluff penalties don't compensate very well for mechanical bonuses, because they're so often ignored. Dungeoncraft: Ray continues to balance the pressures of verisimilitude, and filling the world with secrets to explore and monsters to kill and take the stuff of. Course, the two are not mutually exclusive, you just have to think about what effect all these monsters would logically have on the human communities and each other. This is why I wouldn't start with too small scale a map. It means you can have more things on a map without it seeming crowded, and allows the players to heal up, train, and generally advance the timeline during the days or weeks it takes to journey between significant locations, which also leads to a more realistic advancement rate. So as usual, I agree with most of Ray's advice, but not all of it. Everyone is going to run things slightly differently, and that's a good thing really. I think I'm always going to prefer doing things on a large scale wherever possible.</blockquote>

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