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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6024917" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 294: April 2002part 2/10Yeagar gets judged by the gods on his cruelty to nodwick. Apparently, they aren't too bothered. D&D Previews: Another sign of gearing up for epic level, we see tons of gods statted out in Deities and Demigods. This does not work as well as in 1st ed, partly due to the general inflation of power, and partially because 3rd ed makes constructing your own legal god stats an almighty amount of mathematical work. Not one of their finest hours. The Realms gets a double bill of books. Realms of Shadow shows us the aftermath of the archwizard's return. And another magic heavy series starts up. Spellfire: Shandril's saga by Ed Greenwood. The rules of the universe being changed IC and OOC can drive quite a few stories. Up on a soapbox: Pit traps! Now there's something that needed inventing that you can easily overlook when it isn't there. Hell, you can easily overlook them when they are there, because the whole point is to surprise people and make them suffer.   Amusingly enough, that only came afterwards, once Gary had introduced open pits and let the players get used to that idea. And after that, he rapidly progressed to increasingly sophisticated combinations of spikes, monsters and secret doors within the pits themselves, falling blocks to make sure you don't get out, and all those other devious mechanical contrivances we eventually got an article on back in the late 70's. A good reminder that the exploration part of the game was given more attention in the early days, dungeons had lots of nonlinear stuff that you might not encounter on your first pass through, and obstacles that would kill you in one fell swoop if you were careless or unlucky were a lot more common as well. Making dungeons fair or safe? What's my motivation as an evil archwizard to do that? <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" /> Unless you actually want people to come in and get enough out of it that they tell their friends and come back as part of some longer plan, which is always a possibility, and how the big long-lasting dungeons in the Forgotten Realms are obviously set up. A strong reminder that back then play was more adversarial, and less concerned with creating a coherent world behind the challenges you created for your players. Whether that's a good or bad thing is very debatable, but it once again put the lie to recent letters who claim 3e D&D is more hack and slash oriented than the old days. More than 2e, yeah. More than OD&D and 1e? Nope, no dice. Epic level countdown: Woo. D&D gets the top taken off it's progression. Be it 20th, 30th, 36th, or 40th, they never managed to truly escape the level caps before. But now they can. Unlimited power! Clunky little execution. Get ready for DC 100 skill checks that have effects a wizard could achieve with a 1st level spell, some epic feats that actually do cool stuff, while others merely increase your ability scores by a point, and an epic spellcasting system that causes wizards to draw even further ahead of other primary spellcasting classes the farther you push it. The bigger you make the numbers, the more obvious the drastic differences in flexibility between the classes become, and the more any mathematical trickery can open a gulf between characters of the same level in terms of actual competence. They really ought to playtest the higher level stuff at least as much as the low level stuff, because it's obviously so much harder to get right. Well, at least they tried. And if they're doing a full 6 month lead-in, we'll get plenty of time to look at the bits which were more and less effective individually. Should be a decent amount to talk about here. Kev is not pulling his weight in zogonia. You need a strong stomach to be an adventurer. Dork tower makes player choice irrelevant. Seems a bit ironic for a muskrat to face a marmot.</blockquote>

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