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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6071767" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 304: February 2003part 4/9Saddle up: Ha. Here's an amusing result of the 3e desire to make monster races available as PC's. What do you do when you have an intelligent monster you can ride, and one of the other PC's wants to do exactly that? The question becomes even more interesting when you have a huge monster that can carry everyone else at once, and everyone has missile weapons, flight, and their own ideas about what the group should be doing. So this is one of those specialist articles that'll be either damn useful, or useless depending on if your players decide to add exotic mounts and intelligent monsters to their party. Still, I like it, and it's an idea they never did last edition either, which makes it extra cool to see. Examining the logical consequences of weird premises is how you get some of the most distinctive yet real feeling alternate worlds. Let's get our spellcasters and archers on a dragon and revel in drive-by bombardment and high intensity dogfights, because this doesn't look like it'll bog the game down. Prestige races: Yay! An advancement in rules technology, and the first OGC article in the magazine. The ability to further develop your innate racial abilities is an idea that will get quite a lot of different implementations, with level based ones in Unearthed Arcana & Arcana Evolved, heritage feats in the 3.5 splatbooks, and bloodlines (also UA). Even more interestingly, this doesn't use any of those, instead showing you how to apply a magic item style model to personal upgrades, spending XP and time to gain specific inherent bonuses rather than levelling up or making better gear for yourself. That really demonstrates just how many different ways you can accomplish the same goal in 3e, each having different cost/benefit tradeoffs. It also reminds me that real world evolution isn't a linear process either, but a series of random experiments, with only the good ones surviving and getting to develop further, and the overall trend generally being towards greater diversity and specialisation until a big disaster comes along and changes the environment, at which point whatever survives has to evolve to better fit all the new niches opened up. At the moment, the OGL is very much in the expand and experiment stage of things, only to crash when 3.5 comes along, and lots of products are rendered obsolete, leaving the companies with unsold stock and suspicious the rules could be changed on them again any time. As a result, they moved towards making their own variant corebooks that still used the d20 system, but differed substantially from D&D 3e, with all new classes and variant rules. But anyway, this is a very interesting article indeed. It looks like the benefits are sufficient that spending the XP won't result in you falling behind either, and if anything, you'll soon catch up again because you'll be getting more XP if you wind up a level behind the rest of the party, while still being able to match them in overall power. Most of these are more powerful than feats, and of course you don't have a sharply limited number of upgrades you can purchase either. It might take a little longer to get to 20th level, but you can wind up way more powerful than most nonepic characters by taking this route. Playing around with these will definitely please the CharOp lovers, especially since they also have full permission to develop their own variants on the theme. This is very definitely a positive step by the magazine's writers and i hope it won't just be a one-off experiment.</blockquote>

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