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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6056438" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 300: October 2002part 1/1087 (116) pages. Well, we've made it through another hundred issues. It certainly hasn't been an easy journey, for us or them, and the magazine has lost quite lot of things along the way. Course, they've picked up some others, so it hasn't been all bad, but overall, the 200's haven't been a great time for them. Let's hope the 300's have some more auspicious moments. Unfortunately, first signs don't appear too great. While the first two were both substantially larger than the surrounding issues, and had some special trick on their cover that made them very distinctive, this one has neither of those. In fact, the cover has a lot in common with 274, the 3e changeover issue, only it's even closer zoomed in, and slightly less impressive looking technically. There's also the fact that the theme is once again a tie-in with their latest book, which is as cynical-feeling as ever. Still, at least it's one appropriate to the month, as the book of vile darkness is pretty fitting for an october horrorfest. Like a villain who tries to take over the world every week, only to be thwarted yet again, I shall retain some optimism about the contents. But will I be laughing manically at the end, or cursing those pesky kids for not letting the writers take it all the way? At least there's no way reading it can be as damaging as the in-game book of vile darkness, anyway. Scan Quality: Excellent, indexed, ad-free scan. In this issue:Wyrms turn: The editorial reminds us a couple of interesting, and somewhat contradictory things. The reason many people started buying dragon is because of the cool new stuff in each issue. But until 1996 when they jacked up the regularity of the regular features dramatically, you were never sure what you were going to get. New spells, monsters, magical items, each would appear in less than half the issues. The question is, is that a good thing or not? When you only saw Pages from the Mages once a year, people were writing in to praise it a lot more than they are now Elminster's Guide appears every issue. Part of that can be attributed to familiarity taking the wonder away, and part of that is because even the best writer will run out of their A material if they have to produce a constant stream of content. So this is revealing because it shows how they arrived at their current position of putting D&D specific crunchy stuff in nearly every article. Looking at what was most popular and providing only that, rather than a mixture of stuff that includes the most popular options, plus a few more to catch a wider audience. Which may work better in the short term, but also means you'll hit the point of diminishing returns on a particular thing quicker, and'll find it harder to replace that for some new coolness. This goes quite a way towards explaining why 3e and 4e had shorter edition cycles than the earlier ones as well. When it comes to creative media, if you use the same formula over and over again, it doesn't work as well over and over again, even if the technical quality is actually better on the later instalments. So yeah, they have to deal with the fact that even if they're doing the right thing now, it'll eventually become the wrong thing if they don't change sometimes. It's a big headache.</blockquote>

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