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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6051620" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 299: September 2002part 2/10D&D Previews: Another indicator of how the release schedule has slowed here. More than 2 years in, and they only just release their 3rd monster book. They'd done over a dozen by this point in 2nd ed. Anyway, the MMII gives you a ton more things to kill players with. The Dangerousness to CR ratio is considerably lower than many other books, so easy XP may be a possibility. The Realms took a break last month, and comes back with a vengeance. City of the spider queen takes you down to attack a drow city in an epic adventure that'll take quite few levels to beat. Tying to this is a set of miniatures, so you can visually represent the battles that take place. Interesting marketing strategy. They also release Hand of Fire by Ed Greenwood. Shandrill continues to find spellfire a mixed blessing. Can she get some peace at the end of the trilogy? Dragonlance gets another coffee table artbook. Major Yawn. You haven't had a gameline in ages, and you're still making stuff like this? I don't know :shakes head: Up on a soapbox: A lot of the time, people's decisions all boil down to money. Even adventurers can have that problem, as despite the large hauls they make, there's tons of things that can bleed it off and keep them from retiring comfortably. Paying the help is probably the biggest, although training and equipment costs can be pretty hefty too, especially in 1e, where training is a major inconvenience if strictly enforced. (although since PC's are higher level than their hirelings, they could probably make a big chunk of those wages back by keeping it in-house and charging them the RAW cost for training to level up) So Gary decided to skip dungeoneering for a while, and go take out the middle-men - all those other bandits, brigands and buccaneers that fill out the random encounter tables. Ironically, they have larger treasure selections than most monsters, so this worked quite nicely for a little while, until Mordenkainen & co started to become legendary, which kinda ruined the surprise, and they had to find new pickings elsewhere. Which is obviously a story for a later instalment. In the meantime it's another illustration of the sneaky, anything goes, including metagaming if it'll get you an advantage, adversarial type of old school play, where the goal is to gain as many levels and as much treasure as possible, and playing fair does not come into the equation. (at least on the player's side) It can be pretty fun when you aren't holding back at all, and the stories will be just as interesting as if the DM plotted something out. Question is, how many more stories does he actually have to tell? After the company took off, the amount of time they could actually spend gaming dropped dramatically. You can't spin them out forever. And then what? Will he move onto something else, or is this all he has left? Dork tower just can't get over that marmot thing. I think a little therapy is in order.</blockquote>

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