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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6019121" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 293: March 2002part 2/10Nodwick goes vertical. That means extra pressure from the weight of objects above. That's gotta hurt. D&D Previews: Not a lot going on again. Bastion of Broken Souls brings their adventures up to 18th level. And it looks like it'll get you to epic levels, if you can survive to the end of it. Good thing the rules for that are pretty imminent. If you do that, perhaps you've got a hope at derailing the Realms' current metaplot, as the Wizardwar reaches the end of it's trilogy. Maybe not, but it's the thought that counts. Up on a soapbox: So why the hell did dwarves gain an ability to detect sloping passages in D&D? A general benefit to mining stuff you could understand, but why that weirdly specific power? Well, that is an interesting story, and stems directly from one of Gary's more sadistic little tricks. A dungeon complex that gradually sloped in such a way that players wound up going round in circles as they went down the stairs, round and gradually up the corridors, and then back down again. Obviously they got wise eventually, and so the arms race started. I think that's a good example of how the smaller an environment is, the more idiosyncratic the things that evolve there. The feedback from a few campaigns in the 70's is going to have far more random bits shaping the game's evolution than thousands of groups worth of playtesting in the 3e. And that's obviously why, for better and for worse, 3e is a more universal system, designed to resolve everything the players may think of trying with the same framework. Years of input from different writers will gradually expand and homogenise anything. Profiles: Ray Winninger doesn't get a photo, but does get a longer profile than usual. He's definitely had quite an interesting career, mixing computer game design with pen & paper RPG's, and actually making a decent bit of money from both, which I think demonstrates quite handily how much bigger the RPG market was in the 80s and early 90s. His first game, Underground, still has a cult fanbase despite being put on ice by the company, and pretty much abandoned. He has a whole bunch of other campaign worlds and game mechanic ideas, many of them unpublished, which also look quite interesting. Obviously, given his interests, he sees the gap between RPG's and computer games blurring in the future, with programs to facilitate roleplaying, and games with sophisticated enough AI to allow some meaningful communication with NPC's. And as is often the case, history shows progress has been slower than you'd hope. All we can do is keep plugging on, and hope we aren't too set in out ways to appreciate them when they get there.</blockquote>

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