Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6030059" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 295: May 2002part 1/10116 pages. A man's home is his castle. If you're an adventurer, you can reasonably expect to take that literally, if you can survive enough adventures to earn a decent amount of cash and settle down. So here's a revisiting of one of the many topics they haven't updated since the edition change. Let's hope they manage to improve on the rules, just as they did with vehicle combat last month. After all, why go through the hassle of updating if at the end of it, you can actually do less? Scan Quality: Excellent, indexed. In this issue:Wyrms turn: This is longer than usual, and tackling an important subject they haven't done before. Roleplaying has pretty much survived and moved on from religious wingnuts calling it satanic and trying to get it banned and the books burned. But there's still one important holdout where roleplaying books are regularly banned, and playing games like that is treated with great suspicion. Prisons. Now whether you think prisoners should be allowed to read books and play games during their communal time really hinges on one thing. Do you see prison as primarily a place for punishment, or rehabilitation? If punishment, then yeah, random dickery like that is entirely justifiable. On the other hand, if you're at all serious about rehabilitation, then something that promotes reading, writing, math, problem-solving and teamwork in one entertaining package is a very good option for building life skills that might keep them out of trouble once they're released. There's always going to be a few people who act like dicks no matter what advantages they're given in life, but so much of this can be fixed by better education and social support networks, that make it easier to create jobs and find people suitable to fill them. And the fact that the US has easily the highest proportion of people in prison of any country, while also having vastly more expensive education & medical care and weaker social security programs than most developed nations is probably not a co-incidence. Goes to show, some things, you don't want opened up to private competition and profiteering, because if you do, you get poorer quality services that still wind up costing several times more, and then when they fail, they get the government to bail them out, because the idea of letting them break down entirely and starting anew seems unthinkable. So 10 years later, the problems raised here still seem incredibly relevant, maybe even worse. We should probably do something about that, because punitive punishment of people at the bottom, while letting off the guys at the top is costing us all money and making it harder to get out of this economic slump.</blockquote>

Verification