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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5821495" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 266: December 1999part 1/7116 pages. Ooh. This christmas, lycanthropes and other human/animal shapechangers get their turn at a themed issue. That's fairly welcome and probably a bit overdue, like the similar one for giants this time last year. After all they're another one that has an absolute ton of myths from around the world. This probably won't catch them up with vampires in terms of overall coverage, (and a lot of people prefer them shirtless anyway <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> ) but it certainly can't hurt. Let's ravenously devour the good stuff in this issue, but leave the bad bits politely on the side of the plate.  Scan Quality: Good, some pages slightly curved, no indexing. In this issue:The wyrms turn: Our editorial this month is all about deferred gratification. Revenge is a dish best served cold, release means little without building up tension beforehand, you ought to have to work for your rewards. You know the drill. It's a good lesson to teach because otherwise you wind up with players who are shocked when they don't win every battle without any real challenge, and people who throw tantrums over something as insignificant as a game probably aren't the kind of folks you want to go to for help in a crisis. Which is exactly the kind of stuff people will complain they're causing with both upcoming edition changes, by putting more focus on empowering the player, speeding up advancement, and designating what kind of challenges are appropriate for a character of a given level. I think that's what you call irony. So yeah, we aren't out of this edition yet, and even when they do switch the changes in people's playstyles are going to be more gradual than binary. They should keep giving me something to comment on for quite a while. D-Mail: We start off with a complaint from someone sick of the company's racism agains small people. They simply laugh it off. Oh, they'll regret that next edition, when that small size becomes a huge benefit for spellcasters, and halflings can take any class too. We then move onto a sexism complaint. They fully intend their new minis line to be sexually and ethnically diverse, as they proved in last month's teasers. On the other hand, if you want either gender to have decent fashion sense, you'll be wishing in vain for quite a while. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> A less weighty complaint follows. Which Greyhawk seasonal goddess is the youngest. What a question to ask a lady. Do you really expect to get a straight answer out of them?Next, we have our first edition change complaint. Multiclassing XP penalties suck! That they do, and even though you're not working on full info, it's no surprise that a lot of d20 based games wound up leaving them out with no problems. Even the designers don't really know about the long-term emergent issues with their new system, despite the huge amounts of playtesting.  And finally we have a very long rebuttal letter by Greg Detwiler which goes quite some way towards revealing his own playstyle and design choices. Very interesting indeed. Remember, reskinning allows you to use an old challenge without the PC's instantly knowing the right tactic to foil it. Nodwick stays on good terms with the enemy. It's just a gig. Keep saying it to yourself. Forum wants us to ponder how technology has changed the way we game. Have you tried using email and chatrooms? Maybe you should. They can have quite decent benefits and speed play along. Anonymous shows up for the first time in a few years, to criticise the idea of deceiving the players. 3e ought to have strict rules on what is and isn't acceptable behaviour for a DM that the players can hold them too. Julian Neale, on the other hand, is fully in favour of decieving the players when it would make for a more fun game. Secret rolls are a very useful tool as well if there are traps and the like in the area. Muhahahaha. Lance Goetz is our longest contributor, pointing out that thieves have the least well defined role in the party, and are thus most easily disposed of. Well, they weren't even in the very first corebook. That is technically true. And so we take another step towards redefining them as Strikers. David Boyer averages your int and dex bonuses to determine initiative bonus. This keeps one class from blatantly outshining the others in this area.</blockquote>

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