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: 5886918" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 274: August 2000part 3/7Class acts: Ahh, now if any series defined third edition Dragon Magazine, it's this one, with it's continuous cavalcade of player character centric crunch. Prestige classes were Monte Cook's baby, and he has high hopes for them as a way of allowing players to specialise in certain things and get cool different powers at higher level, instead of following the same old patterns; and a way for DM's to flesh out their campaign world and give specific mechanical benefits to belonging to an organisation. You are strongly encouraged to invent your own, and decide carefully which ones from official books are allowed in your campaign. Ha. Your hopes are going to be cru-ushed <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> We get a mention of ideas we would later see fleshed out in Ptolus, and lots of guidelines on how to make your own (mostly cribbed from the DMG, but then, most people wouldn't have that yet, and they're still trying to sell the new edition to us.) This is a pretty significant bit of historical data. And let's face it, they might not be perfect, but they're better than Kits, since they're not mutually exclusive, scale better, and there's a genuine balancing cost for taking them. So having described prestige classes, they get straight in on the act and give us a new one in the magazine. They're certainly taking this much more seriously than they did for kits. It took them what, until 1993 before the magazine caught on to putting them in regularly. Our first new idea is The Mystic. Vanilla name, and a rather awkward implementation, as they get lots of new spells and abilities, but don't advance in spellcasting level, or gain higher level spells. They'd be neat for a one level dip, but any more than that, and you'd rapidly become horribly suboptimal. This is an excellent example of how they aren't fully experienced in how 3rd ed's rulesystem works, with all the synergies, progressions, and knock-on effects that you have to take into account when designing a character. They may seem cool, but I pity da fool who just jumps into this one, instead of shopping around for the good prestige classes. It'll be interesting to see how soon people figure out that some of these are inadvertently over or underpowered, and start refining their designs in response. Ridley Scoffs at danger: In which Justin Whalin doesn't come off too bad, but the director of the movie once again comes off as in way over his head, trying to make things work despite a limited budget and dubious directiorial skills. It's obvious that both of them wanted it to be a success, since they were some of the first people involved in the production, and I'm not sure at what point most of the people involved will try to play this down on their CV. Googling doesn't seem very helpful with answering this. I guess that shows they didn't talk about it much after it flopped. Steal from the rich: Robin hood, robin hood, riding through the glen. Robin hood, robin hood, with his band of men. Feared by the bad, loved by the good, Robin Hood! Robin Hood! Robin Hood! Oh yes. This is an interesting setting for a campaign. Although maybe not one that's best suited to D&D, given that the story is notoriously magic light as myths go. Well, it is less than a millennium old, and firmly grounded in a specific period of history. And this first article fills you in on the late 12th/early 13th century period where this would have taken place, if it did happen. It turns out that there were plenty of reasons for people to be pissed off at authority at the time, and sherwood forest wouldn't be a bad place for them to hang out, as it's big enough to hide in, but close to a major trade route to rob from. This article is fairly dry, but it gets the facts across in a compact, system light form, and makes it very clear that people don't just become outlaws in a vacuum. If you want a similar figure to make sense in your campaign, you need to set up an enemy for them to rebel against, and a place it would make sense for them to hide out in. So this is a solid starter to their second theme, that'll hopefully allow them to add more crunchy or fantastical elements in the next articles. Wolfsheads: And here we get out the shoehorn, and try and fit our topic into 3e rules. Actually, since 3e has a greater selection of martial character types, and fewer alignment restrictions, it probably handles this better than 2e without a load of house ruling and stripping away powers, at least as long as the characters are low level. The expert, commoner and aristocrat classes'll definitely get a good workout here. In addition to the class advice, which is fairly obvious, we also get 4 new feats for people who want to become kickass bowmen, DC guidelines for various trick shots, and rules for using ranged weapons as improvised melee ones. So they're showing you how easily the rules cover these eventualities, and also how feats allow you to break the regular rules, but in very specific ways. (that you quite possibly won't be able to get enough of for your character concept. ) This definitely shows off the strengths of 3e while glossing over the difficulties, which is exactly what they ought to be doing at this point. So once again, they manage to win over my skepticism with enthusiasm and cool stuff. The great greenwood: We have our time, we have our rules, now for the place. A big sepia toned map of Nottingham, Sherwood forest, and the surrounding environment. Everything is crossreferenced on the grid and easy to find. 23 locations are described, including some that are important to the stories, but off the map. It does feel a bit strange seeing real places that you can still visit today get the mythic treatment, which just goes to show how well grounded the stories are, and likely that there were real world events which inspired them. The UK does have thousands of years of history, which is pretty well documented compared to most of the world, and every village has it's own stories and landmarks that stem from the strange things that have happened in their past. This is vast amounts of plot fodder to a knowledgable DM, and I've pulled ideas from my big book of local myths more than once. So this article is pretty interesting, and has quite a bit of worthwhile information in it, along with a look at how they handle demographics in 3e, which includes a rather higher proportion of mid level characters to go with the much easier advancement rate. For people who were picking the magazine up at the time, before the DMG and MM had been released, there's quite a lot of general information to draw from this issue, and this article plays it's part in that.</blockquote>

Verification