Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5879838" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 273: July 2000part 2/7Forum: Bryan Rantala thinks people are thinking too much about the rules, and not enough about actual roleplaying. If they do that, class imbalances seem far less significant. C. Roach points out that there's now tons of cool variant RPG stuff on the net. Oh, and B. J. Zanzibarrs <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devil.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":devil:" title="Devil    :devil:" data-shortname=":devil:" /> People are sharing a ridiculous amount of cool stuff for free. Take advantage of it, even if the quality control might not be as high as in published books. Steve Damon asks all the people jumping at previews to wait until they have the actual 3e books in their hands to give proper judgement. You know, that's the first time they've said that in here. That is a bit surprising. Michael Bridges thinks a little moral ambiguity makes PC's more fun. Fafhrd and the Mouser never stopped being primarily out for themselves, even when they did wind up doing the right thing in the end. It's more interesting when you don't know exactly what the players are going to do or when. Mike Donavon thinks people shouldn't expect every article to be tailored to their interests. That just seems selfish and self-centred. The hobby is bigger than you, cutter. And remember, even if it isn't useful now, it might be later. You never know when you might find yourself playing Traveller or Runequest again. Heather Woodhurst has enjoyed having familiars play a big part in the game. Hers wound up getting a class and being loved by everyone. Autoscaling in the new edition comes quite welcome. Osveldo Ortega reminds us that priests are servants of gods, and their powers come from a position of supplication, not demanding. They shouldn't expect their god to grant them miracles at a moment's notice. And 3e's playing up their medic side sucks. Cleverness will be replaced by brute force HP soaking to solve problems. Boo. ProFiles: Fittingly for our final 2e issue, we see a profile that says goodbye to a leaving member of staff. Larry Smith has been working on the magazine's art for over 10 years, since issue 157, where the last minute decision to make it a Buck Rogers special from upper management (Roll of thunder, stab of organ music, god I've missed doing that.) resulted in much panic for him. He's had to deal with the Great Nipple Ban, legal department stupidity, mad freelancers, and the spellfire card game. But over time, you can become jaded to anything, and he really needs a change in his life, an escape from the endless roar of the dreaded deadline beast. Maybe he'll get bored after a few months and be back as a freelancer, maybe not. In any case this is a quite different profile from most of the recent ones, avoiding the blatant plugs for future products and relentless optimism, and not presenting a too rose tinted view of the past either. Which is rather refreshing, really. Even if you work in gaming, it doesn't have to be your life, and it can do you good to get out and have other interests. Advice I really ought to heed myself. Oh well, less than a quarter of this to go, and then I can leave it behind for good. Up on a soapbox: After a whole bunch of trying to get people to look back and reevaluate behaviour often seen as immature, Gary gets to the point. If D&D is to survive long-term, it needs to be able to attract new players. And that does mean catching them young. To make that work, you need rules that start off simple, and can get you playing fast, and can then build complexity and provide supplements on myriad subjects to keep up to their spending power. And you need enough cool stuff to hook them in in the first place. This is harder than it sounds, and it was the old Moldvay and Mentzer basic sets that managed it most successfully. There's also the issue that despite Robert saying a DM should learn from a more experienced one, a group may actually have more fun if everyone starts at the same time and learns together. That way, there's no-one telling you you're doing it wrong, acting superior and driving people off before they can get up a bit of experience and investment in the game. Once again, he's questioning not only received wisdom, but the value of wisdom itself when it comes to having fun. Did you have more fun as a child or an adult? Why is that? If the answer is as a child, how can you fix that without abandoning your responsibilities? Pretty deep questions, really. And one the designers of each new edition need to solve in turn, for despite their efforts, roleplayers are still an ageing population. Whatever criticisms people may have of Gary, stupidity is not one. He's right on the mark here, and these questions are still very relevant indeed. I hope the people in charge of 5e are paying attention. Countdown to 3rd edition: Only 1 month to go. Aren't you just bursting with excitement? And they've saved one of the best changes until last. Spontaneous Spellcasting! Sorcerers fill several valuable roles. They let you play a spellcaster without having to do so much bookkeeping, they're a good excuse to put a charisma primary class in the game, and they let you fill an important literary niche that D&D handled really badly before, the spellcaster who developed magical abilities as a twist of fate or ancestry rather than through conscious study over an extended period of time. It's an idea that wasn't obvious before it was done, but made perfect sense and was pretty popular after introduction, with more new classes being spontaneous casters than prepared ones over 3e's lifespan. Basically, they feel awesome, and it's interesting that despite this, they actually turn out slightly less powerful than wizards in long term play. Versatility trumps firepower when given time to prepare, especially once you can make magical items. Similarly, the new implementation of Bards is pretty nifty. Even if they did get criticism for being slightly underpowered in combat, their sheer versatility, able to fill any role, even the healer as a secondary character, plus being the kings of social stuff makes them pretty significant. So this is a fairly exciting teaser, that shows how they're increasing flexibility in the new edition pretty well, and will get players excited about not having to deal with spellbooks if they don't want too. That's the kind of choice I feel very positively about, even if I like quite a bit of bookkeeping myself.</blockquote>

Verification