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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5872931" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 272: June 2000part 2/7ProFiles: Andy Collins is another one of the new recruits, who would go on to be the old guard by the time of the next edition change. He actually joined WotC shortly before they took over TSR, and so got into the biggest gaming company by the back door. He doesn't seem that interested in talking about D&D at the moment, having gone straight from working on Alternity to the new Star Wars d20 game. Still, there's plenty of time for that. Like several of our newer writers, the shock from working with industry giants hasn't quite worn off yet, and he's amazed he got this far. Well, if he were actually an egotistical twat, they'd hardly say it in this magazine, would they. Another pretty solid entry that would still turn out very different if they were writing it today. Up on a soapbox: We've already stood up for the much maligned hack and slash playstyle here. The next logical step is doing the same for Dungeon Crawling. This is somewhat easier to excise from your game than combat. Even in the most political of games, the threat of danger and the possibility of succeeding or failing at your plans is what gives your games real excitement. On the other hand, a site based challenge that you clear out and then don't return too is very much a D&D thing. But since Gary popularised the idea, of course he's going to present it as an essential part of your roleplaying experiences that you should never entirely outgrow. Yeah, once again he's being intentionally polarising largely as a way of provoking debate. I have a sudden urge to dub the trololo song over his appearance in Futurama. Still, as with Ed's perverseness, it's a lot more interesting than most of their writers, and shows that a culture does need elder statesmen who can get away with saying stuff a lot of people are thinking, but are afraid too. And since getting back to the dungeon was one of the 3e taglines, there's still plenty of ground roots support for this playstyle. You do need to recognise when a fashion has been taken as far as it can go and switch to the next wave or wipe out. Countdown to 3rd edition: 2 months to go. Things are really heating up now, as they cover two classes this month. Barbarians have been pretty much completely rewritten for 3e. Their old nature survival themed powers have been exchanged for RAGE and the toughness and agility to survive as a frontline fighter without heavy armor. Eventually they get damage reduction, which was an exceedingly rare power before, but many monsters and a reasonable minority of characters will now be able to shrug off an infinite number of scratches. They're definitely a lot more combat focussed than they used to be. Rangers haven't changed as much on a conceptual level, but the implementation of their powers has been remixed quite a bit. Their spell selection is slightly bigger, their favored enemy power now scales nicely, and they're no longer restricted by alignment. They're just getting the general upgrade all of the classes are. This isn't as interesting as the last few, because it doesn't reveal some big aspect of the new rules, just little details. Next month's teaser, on the other hand? Brand new class ahoy. The readers have a full month to speculate about that. Bahamut & Tiamat: The 3e teasers escalate with our first full monster statblocks. And pretty significant they are too. After all, the big bosses of the good and evil dragons took a break for an entire edition, only showing avatars in Monster Mythology. But since 3e is pushing the player empowerment in a fairly significant way, you once again have a chance of killing gods. Not that it'll be an easy fight, even at 20th level though, for their stats are in numbers you simply didn't see in earlier editions. The players may be stronger, but the monsters are beefed up too. So this gives you a pretty good warning of just how big high level statblocks get in 3e, and how they've changed the general format for monsters. The teasers may have shown us bits and pieces, but this gives you a far more complete picture. It is indeed a pretty significant step. Shame we won't see any letter responses to it before the actual books are out, given their response time. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> PC Portraits: Last year we had dragonslayers in this column. This time it's dragonriders. Another of those cases where you put characters from the two groups in the same party, they will probably end up fighting. They're all pretty heavily armoured, and a couple of them are protecting their eyes as well. Well, full-grown dragons are generally more than strong enough to carry a whole party without seriously reducing their speed. And if you're fighting other dragons or similar high level threats, you need all the protection you can get. You can still adorn yourself with bright colours and precious jewelery, and do spectacular stunt flying, but without some pragmatism, you won't last many fights.</blockquote>

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