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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5952791" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 282: April 2001part 3/7Meanwhile, back in the slime pits of Karvan: Robin Law's first contribution this month is about scene changes, particularly when the players are split up. Some say you should never split the party, but this becomes very unrealistic once you get out of the dungeon and into a social environment. You probably will have to do it at some point, and there are definitely tricks you can do to make it flow better. You need to balance two main objectives. Keeping the players interested despite the fact that they might not be involved in the narrative for a while, and keeping track of what's happening where, and when. Both of these are made easier by regular, fairly fast switching of perspectives, somewhere between 5-15 minutes, which keeps players from drifting off, and one narrative from getting too far ahead of another. If it looks at all like their paths are going to cross, fudge events so it happens. This bit is pretty familiar from my own experiences as a GM. However, he also gives quite a bit of advice for players in this situation too, which I hadn't thought about so much. Once again, this is pretty useful stuff, pushing you towards a more story oriented style of gaming where the players use OOC knowledge to make their characters work together in a way that would be good for the story, rather than disrupting each other and breaking up the group for good. Take that, Tracey Hickman!D&D personal ads: Or how to advertise for new players in a way that might not actually attract them, but will definitely get their attention. April fool! As with the guide to etiquette, there are some genuinely helpful bits of advice here, but they're hidden amongst the jokes, and it's only really helpful if you already know the right answer. I think this time the comedy part outweighs the useful advice, making this more just an entertainment piece. Still, once again, the illustrations are excellent, with one of those rare cases where the writer is also the illustrator, so the images fit with and enhance the mood of the text perfectly. I do find it interesting how they're varying the art style quite a bit from the norm for this issue, giving the comics guys more to do. Heroes of the underdork: Last year, Nodwick & co got stats for 2nd edition as part of the april festivities. This time, Muskrats get racial stats, courtesy of John Kovalic and the Dork Tower cast. As seems appropriate, they are a bit underpowered, and quite a bit of this is comprised of jokes, but the statistics are actually legal and usable in 3e. If you were using ECL, they'd definitely deserve to be ECL -1 to balance them out with the other PCs, since they have a total of -4 to their ability scores, and their special powers are nothing much to write home about. So unless you're playing in a game world with a serious giant crayfish problem, powergamers wouldn't touch these guys with a 10 foot pole. Maybe you could get away with having one as a henchman. <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" /> Snack monsters: O HAI joke monsters. With plenty of stats and powers that are either mechanically nonsensical or absurdly overpowered, which means you can't really use them in game. Pizza slices, Gummi bears, Doritos, jolly ranchers and spilled pepsi get stats, scaled up to the size they would appear to be to your 25mm minis. So this is true old school silliness, of the sort that's purely for entertainment purposes, not game use unless you're willing to put quite a bit of fudge in (Although I think a toffee monster would be more dangerous. ) It's been a while since we had one of those, and they stand out in starker relief with 3e's more precise and codified rules. It's certainly interesting, anyway. Fiction: Possessions by Elaine Cunningham. Elaine has obviously been reading the FR books in development, because she's already using the 3e magic terminology. Well, when you're setting your story in Halruua, you need to be up to date in the latest in metaphysics. Otherwise you're going to end up in the out crowd.  Or alternately, you can delve into unfashionable and morally questionable fields in search of greater power, and win prestige that way. Which leads to a bad end if you get it wrong. And this definitely winds up falling into the cautionary tale category, showing an ambitious young wizard paying the price for her reckless ambition. Sure she gets immortality out of it, but it's not a very pleasant eternity. In fact, the degree of dramatic irony could almost make this a Ravenloft story. (Actually, they've never done Ravenloft fiction in the magazine, have they. ) So she can tell a good story when she puts the elf fetishism away for a bit. Who knew.</blockquote>

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