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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5883238" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 273: July 2000part 6/7PC Portraits: This column always likes to join in, and swashbucklers have an easy iconic visual appearance, so they have an easy job this month. A nice smile, a stylish outfit, a flamboyant hat, and the confidence to not look like an idiot jumping around the place and cracking one-liners. Easy to describe, not always so easy to implement. Still, they're both racially and sexually inclusive, and not all of them are weilding the same old rapier/main gauche combo. I think this is a decent enough collection to choose from. Shop keep suffers one of the more blatant breaches of gaming etiquette I've seen in a while. Arms Race: So it's the final Alternity article. How could they possibly spend their final bit of coverage for an RPG other than D&D in a valuable way that'll stick in our memory for years to come? Well, certainly not more weapons, when we now have a full book on that already. Yes, it looks like we're going out with another load of new toys, not a mature culmination of their creative efforts. More than a little disappointing. So here are 5 new melee weapons, and 14 different guns of myriad sizes, shapes and power sources. Tons of ways to kill people, and a few that'll incapacitate them without killing them. People never stop looking for more efficient means of inflicting violence upon each other, do they. Very very disappointing, which is not the kind of note I wanted to end this on. There's so much more that you could have done with this system, and you end it on a filler episode. I guess this is goodbye then. If only there was something we could have done. Wizards live: A couple of notable special guests this month. Lisa Stevens gets a profile, which she never did in the magazine, despite her importance to it. And the creator of Babylon 5 and other cool TV shows J Michael Straczynski pops in for a chat. Every day apart from thursdays and saturdays is once again filled with something. A lot of it is devoted to the new RPGA stuff, as they gear up Living Greyhawk for everyone to play. The logistics of that must be fairly substantial. Still, at least they can set stuff up wherever there's a decent player base without having to pay international phone rates just to talk. I wonder if they're still printing and mailing out all the modules from a central location? Economies of scale can still make that cheaper, weirdly enough. So this shows their online support as a still evolving process. The majority of the population are aware of it and participating to some degree, but it has yet to take over completely from the traditional distribution channels. And since that's still an ongoing process, 12 years later, I think we'll probably have more to say on that in later issues. Dungeoncraft: So what does a DM actually do in play, asks Ray. Provides descriptions of the world, and resolves what happens when characters interact with it. When you put it like that, it sounds so simple. But they need to be good descriptions, while not being so verbose as to take up too much of the session time, so they players have a decent amount of information to react too, and enough time to act in. This is where all your preparation actually turns into success or failure. Give them enough information to choose a course of action, preferably one that you've prepared for, and if they do do something not covered in your notes, improvise a result that is interesting and makes sense. His big question here is if you should reveal all the info players need to make an accurate judgement of a scene upfront, or just the basics, forcing them to ask questions if they want to find all the treasure and avoid tripping any traps. With an assumption that a lot of the time, setting puzzles that test the intelligence of payers rather than their characters is a good thing. This advice won't be particularly relevant if your game is pure hack and slash, or narrativist one for whom all the conflict is interpersonal and the environment is just an unimportant backdrop. But between those extremes, they are some pretty important questions that don't have a one size fits all answer. Players will differ in their natural curiosity as much as DM's will in their innate verbosity. Hopefully this'll help you figure out what will best suit you and your players. And if you survive the first session, it should get easier from there.</blockquote>

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