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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5892821" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 275: September 2000part 2/7Nodwick comes this close to snapping. Once again, a huge chunk of adverts are put near the front, before we get to see any actual features. This is a rather silly development. We're just going to skip through them. Previews: You know what's first up this month. The Dungeon Master's Guide. Essential corebook and all that. No need to go into detail on this one. Also unsurprisingly, this month's peripherals are connected to that. A DM's screen. And our first official 3rd ed adventure. The Sunless Citadel. So now it gets a little easier to actually play the game, particularly since you have at least all the monsters in there statted out. Hopefully that'll keep you from going mad 'til next month. Our various settings also get a reasonable amount of love. Greyhawk gets reaffirmed as the core setting for this edition with the D&D Gazetteer.  Course, it's done by Skip Williams, and if you've been reading this thread, you know what crap he's put in here before. No more comedy relief gargoyles, ok? The Realms and Dragonlance enjoy their usual quota of novels. The Nether Scroll by Lynn Abbey and Children of the Plains by Paul Thompson & Tonya Cook. Things continue to get set up for the rules changes in the game. Baldur's gate II also gets novelised. Surprised they haven't done a module based on it too. Probably too big and combat heavy if strictly converted. Dork tower takes advantage of the edition change to upgrade their characters. Unusual suspects: So all classes are open to all races now? This is a fairly substantial change, and needs some following up. So they take what used to be the most restricted classes - Barbarians, Paladins and Rangers, and give us a wide range of concepts for all the various demihuman races to show how they could fit into the classes if you so desire. They're being consciously inclusive and can-do, inviting us to try things they would have sneered at officially a few years ago, and unlike the introduction of Power Plays and character optimisation as a game in itself, this is entirely to be welcomed. It may not seem like such a big deal now, but it was resisted for quite a while, so they do need to make that extra effort to get everyone on board. Down with fantasy Racism! Up with equal opportunities! The punk aspect seems ever more appropriate here. Which means this is entertaining, and needed at the time, but not so useful in retrospect. PC Portraits: We've already had some fighter centric portrait collections, such as issue 257. But of course it's a new edition, and new art stylings. Which means people have more asymmetrical outfits, tattoos, piercings, braids, straps, and similar interesting adornments that will make them stand out, but not necessarily be practical. So once again, this is oh so very of it's time, and reflects that they did feel the need to exaggerate the break from what came before and establish a new identity for themselves. The characters will remain useful whenever you feel the desire to add a little dungeonpunk to your setting. Only you can decide if you want that though. How to design a feat: Ah yes, feats. One of the most contentious parts of 3e design. The point buy character design method attempted in Skills & Powers had proven not too popular, and maybe took the focus away from class archetypes too much. (as well as being an open invitation to min-max the hell out of the game. ) Yet they did want to make 3e characters more flexible customisable and balanced than old ones. So feats occupy a kind of middle ground in terms of complexity. You don't have to worry about crunching vast numbers of points or saving up to buy an expensive ability, it's always one feat per slot. And they aren't class specific, although many will be useless unless you are a particular class, like the metamagic feats. But some are almost definitely better than others, and you will have to do quite a bit of planning ahead to get hold of the ones with complex prerequisites. But those are my thoughts in hindsight. Their discussion of what you do with feats, how you create them and how you balance them has some different concerns, such as designing it with the most abusive cases in mind, not the average player, and making sure something isn't better just because it's more specific. This is very high density, and there's a lot to analyse, cite, and use as fuel for internet arguments. Plus it includes two new feats that will make it into future books. So it's a good peek into the thoughts of the official writers, and like the last two articles, valuable as a historical artifact. It's very worthy of noting for later reference. The right tool for the job: No surprise that we have an article on exotic weapons, now the distinction has been introduced. Of course, to justify spending a whole feat slot on one, they need to be more useful in some reasonably significant way than regular simple and martial weapons. And taking a look at these, it's mixed bag. Boomerangs only come back if they miss the enemy, Sais are great at disarming, Scourges do three little attacks per round, great scimitars extra damage compared to 2 handed sword will add up quite a bit over time. They are useful, just maybe not useful enough. This illustrates another thing that would evolve over the course of 3e. Realising that 7 feats over 20 levels just isn't enough, more and more classes included bonus feat selections, and many D20 variants increased the progression to 1 per 2 levels, or even faster in the case of True20. In the meantime, we have quite a few speedbumps and newbie traps to work though, some unintentional. Quite a bit of this fits that bill, I'm afraid.</blockquote>

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