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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5866663" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 271: May 2000part 2/7Forum: Lance Goetz praises almost everything he's seen so far about 3e apart from the new initiative system. Looks like all the talking we've done in the forum is paying off. Brian Moran finds Co-DMing has produced a campaign better than either could have managed on their own. Healthy competition plus learning from each other is a pretty potent combination. Don't take on the weight of the universe alone. Brian Corvello points out just how often sci-fi and fantasy actually cross over. The lines are very blurry indeed. Particularly in comic books, which mix magic, technology and aliens casually and screw the cosmology. The only real limit is the writer's imagination. Rhian Hunt points out how much of D&D is directly derived from tolkien, but at the same time totally lacking in the same kind of depth and meaning. Hey, we're trying! Not all of us are literary geniuses able to stick to a single imaginary world over the course of decades. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /> Roger Cox put three rust monsters in a giant floating pig, and relied upon the player's curiosity to seal their own doom. Well, it was the 70's. Everything was a lot goofier back then. Only the most sadistic of wizards would do something like that IC though. I wonder if Zagyg approves. Sneak preview: The D&D movie! It's finally on! Oh frabjulous day, that we live to see such sights. And then we gouge out our eyeballs, so we may never see such glorious horrors again. I mean, really, blue eyeshadow? A thief called Snails? The lamest beholders evar? Even Jeremy Iron's scenery chewing can't save the day. And it looks like we have at least 6 months of promotions to mock before they can even begin to give a realistic opinion of it's merits. This should be fuuun. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devil.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":devil:" title="Devil    :devil:" data-shortname=":devil:" /> Anyway, here we get shots of all the main characters, and several of the sets. Ironically, the outside bits look faker than the inside shots, which were filmed in cool real world eastern european buildings. Another demonstration of how practical effects date less than CGI. Most of the clothes don't look too bad at this resolution, aside from the Dwarf, and the Wayans ridiculous earflaps. And hey, at least they'e trying for a bit of racial diversity. I still wonder why they didn't include a cleric on the team though. Did they really think that would be too uncool or a hard sell to a wider audience? But those are small nitpicks compared to the ripping other people have already given this. We shall have to see if I can build up to that kind of frothing fury. ProFiles: Steve Miller looks decidedly not amused at the thought of being profiled. He joined TSR with the intent of working on Mystara, just before it was cancelled, leaving all the stuff he was working on unpublished. Not a pleasing experience. He's persevered though, continuing to do AD&D work when he'd really rather be doing D&D stuff. And with the coming of the new edition, it looks like he's got his wish. Well, they would say that, since they're designing it. If they didn't like what they were creating, they'd change it. He certainly seems to have pretty broad tastes in reading and viewing, which the flexibility of the new edition better suits. He'd rather like to do more fiction in the future, which is interesting to note. My memory fails me as to what he gets up to over the next decade, so I'll have to do a little research, see if that wish pans out. Up on a soapbox: Gary's latest rant is somewhat less challenging and divisive than the last few months. Roleplayers aren't all stupid and socially retarded. It's a hobby that requires both reasonable literacy and regular interaction with other people. That's obviously going to skew things towards the upper end of the intelligence spectrum. Given that he's preaching to the choir here, I don't think many people are going to want to argue with that. So I have less to comment on here than the last few. Just remember to wash regularly. It's not pleasant for your friends, it's not pleasant for strangers, and if you live in a 1st world country, very unlikely you can't afford it, even in the current economy. So no excuses. Countdown to 3rd edition: 3 months to go. I think it's been made fairly clear for a while that Monks were coming back in 3e. After all, the Greyhawk revivalists at WotC were big fans of them. So they're back, revamped for the new rules, but with essentially the same kind of powerset. And here we have an opportunity to talk about several interesting rules issues. 3e's multiclassing system, and the linear warrior, quadratic wizard problem. Now, 3e multiclassing is probably better than the two systems used in previous editions, particularly the clunky dual-classing humans had to put up with. And for the fighty classes it works pretty well, mixing and matching levels in fighter, ranger, rogue, etc isn't a huge problem (actually, due to the front-loading of rogues and rangers, a good build in another class could often involve taking a level or two in them. ) But for the spellcasters, you just couldn't compete with a straight single class one, and the patches, such as dual advancement prestige classes, only mitigated the problem, not solved it. Still, some of the many experiments in d20 games did better, often by using completely different magic systems that don't scale in the same way, or are more linked to your character level than your class level. And didn't short-circuit the issue by stripping down your options to only a dozen or so even at high levels like 4e did. Of course, you do have to ask the question if it's possible to create a truly balanced system without removing meaningful choice, and if you want flexible multiclassing anyway, or if it's a poor compromise between having strong archetypical characters, and point buy systems which let you build exactly what you want (as long as you have enough points. ) There really is a lot to think about here, and more questions than answers. Still, it's not as if you can't have fun with any edition of D&D, so the rules can't be total failures. Let's see what elements they reveal next month.</blockquote>

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