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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5952038" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 282: April 2001part 2/7Previews: The average rate of releases continues to drift downwards, as they start to try Ryan Dancy's idea of letting third party companies handle all the little stuff. One adventure, and a couple of novels. The Standing Stone widens their styles covered again, with ghostly horror. Woo. Not that it'll have the same impact as Ravenloft did. The Floodgate by Elaine Cunningham takes us back to Halruaa for some more political intrigue and mystery novel fun. Dragons of a Lost Star by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman is the second book in the war of souls trilogy. Big cataclysm no 3 proceeds according to schedule. Countdown to the forgotten realms: 2 months to go. Here they talk about the metaphysics behind magic in the Realms, with the Weave, and the Shadow Weave, and the effects they have in game. Most spellcasters draw on the regular weave, which is owned by Mystra, and if it's taken out or damaged, you get dead and wild magic zones. You can get around that by drawing on the shadow weave instead, but that's harder and has it's own drawbacks. There are other rarer types of magic as well, many of which we've already seen mentioned like spellfire, but under the new edition they'll be better differentiated mechanically. After all, shouldn't you use the rules update to make the game work a little more like the fiction? This is a good reminder of the fact that I like game rules as universe physics style thinking, and 3e is easily the best edition of D&D so far for playing like that. So this teaser is one of the better ones from my point of view, showing how they're trying to give you more fun options to play with and integrate them into the setting. I still like my shiny toys sometimes. Up on a soapbox: This month, all the elements Gary looks at are on the upper end of the scale. Assuming a role is right at the top, beating even combat, which makes sense given the name of the game is Role-Playing. At the bottom, (but still getting a decent score) is random chance, which I suppose reflects people's increased desire to design their characters manually, and the rise of games that don't use dice or generally have far less randomisation than older ones. If he'd asked a decade ago, that's probably the one that would have changed the most. Problem solving and questing are also fairly high on most people's priorities. A few people may be satisfied creating their character, and then hanging around socialising IC, but most want to go places, have goals, face external threats and grow accordingly.  Now the question is what will be right at the top and bottom of the league. Still a few more elements to go and people are still submitting. Maybe there'll be a last minute surge. Dork tower gets some calls from the other kind of roleplayers. You really shouldn't just reject them. New players like that would be good for the hobby's image. The outgoing goblin's guide to gaming etiquette: Our humour pieces begin with some decidedly mixed advice about how to run a good game. While there is actually a good chunk of decent advice in amongst the jokes, there's also some bits of trolling that you really shouldn't heed if you value the cohesiveness of your group. I'm not entirely certain if this is meant primarily as an entertainment piece, but I'm leaning that way. April fool. The illustrations are rather good, anyway. Logic missiles: In issue 271, we had a whole bunch of articles on puzzles. At the time, I made the comment that it would be better to concentrate in ones that work off universal principles, than ones dependent on the quirks of the english language, which your characters wouldn't be speaking IC. Well, my desire has been fulfilled, with a nice 8 pager giving lots of example logic puzzles. While there is some humour in the writing, this is largely a serious piece, drawing upon a whole variety of different puzzle types, some with multiple solutions, which is the joy of having more open-ended challenges. So unlike the earlier article, I can see myself drawing upon this for ideas to challenge my players with, although I wouldn't lift them wholesale. A little more logic in a game rarely hurts, unless it slows everything down due to overanalysis. Bard on the run is back! With filks based upon brand new songs, not stuff decades old even when the magazine was published. Britney Spears and N'Sync were always pretty self-aware about how cheesy and manufactured they were, so you don't have to stretch very far to make them into comedy. Similarly, ZZ Top have long since become parodies of themselves. So easy targets this year, but at least they're more in tune with fashion than they used to be. That's worth a little praise.</blockquote>

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