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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5886073" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 274: August 2000part 2/7Profiles drops it's odd capitalisation, but acquires one of those odd foreign letters instead of a proper o. It also splays out over the bottom half of three pages, instead of being formatted in it's own section, so it runs parallel with the letters. This is mildly irritating, and rather gimmicky. This month's profilee is Jonathan Tweet, designer of Ars Magica, Over the Edge, and now one of the lead designers for 3rd edition. He makes the rather unfortunate misstep of comparing the new ruleset to the pokemon game, saying both involve customizing your character build to fight in battles, and level up your characters as a primary objective. Yeah, that's gonna cause a few flamewars. His optimism about the state of gaming as a whole certainly contrasts with Gary's worries about the aging of the hobby last month. But then, even if tabletop gaming dies, there's still LARPing and computer games which are heavily drawn from TTRPG DNA. And people are still playing lets pretend in all sorts of forms. You've got to be willing to set your criteria broadly and change with the times, otherwise your expectations are bound to be disappointed.Nodwick's team seem curiously unwilling to get in on the grimdark scene. Guess he gets to keep this magic item for himself. Dragonmirth is back! Thank god for that. And it's all the more fresh for it's break. Coming soon returns to being called Preview, although without the TSR, or the s, curiously. Oh well, on with the show.First, completely obviously, is the new players handbook. No surprise there. Blah blah exhaustively playtested better than ever. That it may be true makes the copy no less tedious to read. Still, you don't have to pay any extra for the character generation software this time around. Course, you still won't have all the tools needed to play the game. If you can't wait, or just want a more newbie friendly version, you can get the D&D Adventure game boxed set. Course, that really won't hold a candle to the old Moldvay or Mentzer versions in terms of mass market penetration, but they've gotta keep trying. They also have character record sheets, for those of you who like to buy these things instead of printing them off or just drawing them up roughly yourself (which is of course, rather trickier with the higher interlocking crunch quotient of the new edition. ) Their novel lines continue to chug along happily, despite the break in gaming products. Forgotten Realms finally kills off King Azoun IV for good, having faked us out before, in Death of the Dragon. Let the succession wars commence. Dragonlance turns up the heat on their latest conflicts with Draconians in The Citadel by Richard A. Knaak. Flying fortresses? Those never work out well for the people underneath them. I hope they aren't gnome powered. Shop keep gets renamed Dork Tower. I think that's an improvement, don't you. It certainly allows the writer a little more freedom in the range of his jokes. One roll to rule them all: Logically, our first proper article is explaining the core mechanic. Most games have had one for over a decade. Hell, even FASERIP did, and that was the mid 80's. But since D&D hasn't had a major revision before, they stuck with the mass of ad hoc subsystems approach long after most designers had realised how much easier a core mechanic makes a game to learn. Well, you've got your wish. Now the real complexity comes in figuring out all the modifiers to apply to your d20 roll. It's not the best of core mechanics, as the odds of success increase in a linear fashion, and very high or low numbers become a foregone conclusion, but at least it's easy to calculate your chances, which is very handy for a DM adjudicating things on the fly. Of course, having made it easy to set things with a 50% chance of succeeding, they then muck with that. Attack rolls generally increase faster than AC, to keep combats from going on forever with escalating hit points. On the other hand, your non favoured saving throws do not keep pace with monster's ability to penetrate them, which means save or suck effects actually become nastier at high levels than in previous editions. Which they'll realise, and seriously nerf them in 3.5, before fixing the math entirely in 4th edition. So this shows that they did have a good idea what they were doing in the short term, but weren't aware of all the long term consequences of their actions. That's life for you. I don't think anyone can really predict more than a few steps ahead where there's thousands of variables to consider. Playtesting confidential: Of course, some of those problems could have been fixed if they'd playtested high level characters a little more. Despite having over 100 groups going at it for nearly 2 years, they're still going to spot and respond to the problems that come up in low level play and common situations more. Still, it's a lot more than most games manage. This is as much about the technology that enabled this process as the playtesting itself. The internet let them send the rules out to people all over the world, see what issues came up more independently, and revise the rules in response to feedback without spending a load of money printing and mailing out new versions every time. They simply couldn't have run something like this 10 years ago. And if someone broke the NDA, they could simply cut them off without worrying about socialising with them anymore. The notes from individual playtesters are pretty entertaining, with a certain amount of mischief in the parts of the rules they cover. It's a party in here, and they're the ones bringing the noise. When people want to do things for you for free, you enable them, not throw obstacles in their way. And that's one rule they're certainly following this edition. It's hard for this exuberance not to rub off on me.</blockquote>

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