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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6028612" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 294: April 2002part 9/10The play's the thing: Robin Laws manages a third article this month. talking about the benefits of keeping a log of play. Course, the format is important. You do not want to write up an elaborate poetic account while in the middle of the action, (unless you have a big party and it takes ages to resolve every single round, in which case you might want to take notes while you wait for your character's turn to act again. ) But you don't want to forget important detail either, especially if your game only runs monthly or less. Curiously, this isn't aimed at DM's, but at players, and encourages you to write IC, and tailor your account according to their agendas and biases, with the intent that this'll make your character seem more prominent in the overall narrative, and the DM is more likely to focus future plot hooks on you, because you have more personality detail to hang them on. So there's a certain degree of competitiveness here, although he warns agains outright alienating the other players. What may seem like a healthy amount of teasing and jockeying for advantage to you might wind up being taken personally if they're too sensitive. That wasn't exactly what I was expecting from him, and is pretty interesting. I've always encouraged a certain degree of PvP competition to keep the game surprising to everyone, (and so I don't have to do so much work building plots, because they'll generate hooks themselves) but I'm surprised to see him encouraging it. I guess that's part of the reason he wants mechanically codified social conflict mechanics. It makes it easier to have IC conflict between players that gets resolved with a definite winner but doesn't turn lethal or get taken personally. There's your thought for today. Silicon Sorcery: Two little articles for different games, and by different writers this month. This column obviously continues to be popular amongst the magazine's writers. The first is three new spells adapted from Nightcaster, giving you some more options for inflicting large amounts of typed damage on enemies plus interesting secondary effects. Jet of water, entrapping spikes of lava or stunning bolts of positive energy, these'll all make decent alternatives to fireball and lightning bolt if your spellcasters grow bored of them. The second part is the more significant though, as it's a teaser for Neverwinter Nights. Just as the OGL is letting people publish D&D compatible material fairly freely, this creates a sandbox that you can use to build your own adventure locations and custom monsters and items, within the limits of the framework provided. This certainly showed people how to build more cost effective magical items, with stuff like a +1 weapon that also added 1d6 each of fire, electricity, acid and sonic damage each hit being considerably nastier than a straight +5 one. The sample items backconverted all fit firmly within this mould, granting bonuses to AC, specific skills, saving throws, etc, in addition to their primary bonuses. It shows how you can get a fair amount of design flexibility even within a computer game by boiling things down to a sophisticated formula. Ok, you're never going to be able to jump, ride, fly, or summon more than one or two monsters at a time, but there's still enough permutations to keep people playing and designing new scenarios for years. So this is a fairly exciting little preview, that I think accurately demonstrates what the game encourages in terms of design. And unlike the one for Deities and Demigods, what it reveals is pretty encouraging.</blockquote>

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