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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5938950" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 280: February 2001part 2/7PROfILES: Looks like the many complaints in the letters have been listened too, because this is back on it's own separate pages again. An improvement, methinks. Aaron Williams (not to be confused with Aaron Allston, who has also done awesome D&D work) is the artist responsible for Floyd, Nodwick, and lots of illustrations, particularly for Dragonmirth, which would have been a lot less colourful without his sense of humour. He's another workaholic, having finally hit it big with nodwick, he's milking it for all it's worth, producing stuff faster and faster (and the amount of attention to little details is dropping in response. The early Floyd stuff looks considerably better than his current output. :\ ) Ahh, the joys of commercialism. Still, as long as he's having fun as well, and people are enjoying something he's producing, it's a lot better than being a starving artist, or having a boring day job. Up on a soapbox: The first results are in, and Gary looks at the first 4 elements on his list in alphabetical order. Here we see a fairly substantial gulf appear straight away, with building stuff and running businesses being very much niche concerns, while character development and combat are front and centre in most campaigns. This doesn't surprise me in the slightest. For all that roleplaying allows us to do things we couldn't in reality, most people still stick to human scale, rather than playing out the complexities of entire organisations or nations. Plus they seem to be harder to design simple, effective rules for. And a good battle always draws in the punters. So far, so predictable. Let's see if economics and politics stick to that trend next month. The mailbag: Woo. Statistics. Fairly interesting ones too. Despite the new edition just being out, there are fewer questions on it than there are requests for more support of their various settings. And a quite ridiculous proportion are press releases, presumably for other RPG's and various products that they quite possibly don't even cover. Companies have to deal with spam as well, and I pity the person who gets the job dealing with that, especially when they put something they shouldn't have in the bin and get shouted at later. Still, at least now we know the approximate odds of actually getting printed if you write in. (somewhere between 1-2% Persist and you can probably make it. It's always worth noting that much of the obstacle to achieving things is in your mind, and those around you who think the social order is bigger and more inflexible than it is. Nodwick adapts to the developments of the new edition. And gets suitably spontaneous. Previews: The Realms continues to release gamebooks despite technically being on a countdown. The Faerun monster compendium comes along, and sticks rather closer to the old ways of ecology and setting integration than the corebook. Well, Ed did pioneer these things. He'd want it that way. Our other big deal is the new D&D miniatures line. The first 6 sets of heroes and monsters. Hello to another big moneyspinner that we'll see plenty of bitching about over the years. ZOMG they're making D&D into a boardgame. And this month's novel is The Messenger, by Doug Niles. The Elves of Silvanesti continue to be bitchy pains in the ass who produce adventures by social ostracism. You're just making more trouble for yourself in the long run. Countdown to the forgotten realms: 4 months to go, and they give this column 2 pages this time to make it a bit less insubstantial. This time, we find out that there's going to be a bit of power creep in the divine department, as they more than double your selection of domains, and introduce the divine champion prestige class, which is just plain better than a regular fighter in all ways, having the same BAB and feat progression, plus good reflex saves and a decent subset of paladin's abilities. It's available to a follower of any deity, and the requirements aren't onerous at all, so you'd be a mug not to pick up those extra powers. Or just not play a fighter in the first place. <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" /> Yeah, that seems like the better course of action. They aren't wasting time to power up the weak options, are they. Dork tower goes off on a tangent. And probably has more fun that way anyway. So it goes.</blockquote>

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