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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6028186" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 294: April 2002part 8/10Chainmail: The western side of Oerth, on the other hand, isn't wallowing in the past, but instead eagerly trying to loot it so all the sides can get an edge in their current war. Want to go to the site of one of the main battles in the ancient gith/illithid war, or see what's inside a fallen meteor? Or would you rather strike at their homebase while they're out treasurehunting so they come back to a burned ruin and feel the whole thing was futile, and then nick anything of value while they're tired and low on supplies from the trek back? As usual, they're trying to make sure the material here is good for both players of the wargame, and people who want to try actual D&D games set in the western continent, with mechanics for fighting in the new locations that make them quite a bit more hazardous than regular solid ground. Fighting over a gaping chasm is particularly dangerous, with instadeath immanent if you're hit and fail your save. Well, it's a wargame, so you're not as invested in individual units, so they can still get away with that here. <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" /> As before it seems that this is both more forward looking, and more willing to embrace some old D&Disms than current 3e writers, presumably because it's a smaller department and they have more freedom to experiment. And as before, I can definitely see myself using some of these ideas to fun ends, so this column remains welcome in the magazine. Command points: Our tactical advice this month focusses on builds good for games with lots of players at once. The victory conditions have been simplified, and it's quite possible to win without defeating all of your opponents. So these groups generally have smaller numbers of more powerful creatures that'll hopefully be able to get the drop on an enemy, and kill enough for a win before everyone else can gang up to stop whoever takes the lead. So it seems a fairly significant consideration here is making sure games don't become long and unweildy as you add more players, and everyone gets round to their turn fairly quickly. This is helped by the fact that there's no really powerful monsters with abilities that can lock down the entire battlefield in one go. So this demonstrates that you can have game balance providing you bound the playing field tightly enough. The problem is then that roleplaying games by their nature encourage you to try things that don't fit into neat slots, while wargames don't. And if you try taking away too much flexibility in the name of balance you get something like 4e, which it turns out doesn't please everyone after all. Still, you can definitely get solutions for many situations, as this article shows. Just don't fall into the trap of thinking one size can fit everyone.</blockquote>

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