Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6073040" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 304: February 2003part 7/9Silicon sorcery: We've finished promoting neverwinter nights for now, so it's time to give Asheron's Call 2 a turn. Like the first one (see issue 284) this has a lot of cool stuff worth stealing for D&D, with their skill tree system converting neatly to the 3e feat one. They aren't as amusingly metagamey as the previous selection, but they are a pretty solid collection of fighting style feats that give you more options to enhance your attacks, possibly at the cost of trading off one facet of your stats to be considerably more effective at another. Improving your pain inflicting, unpredictability, or counterattacking skills are the kind of tricks that are entirely valid in any setting, so while less quirky than last time, these are more balanced and generally applicable. I suppose that fits the overall way the magazine has gone in the past couple of years. So let your fighters have a good look through these. They're unlikely to regret it. Campaign news: 3.5 may have surprised a lot of people, but if they'd been paying attention to the constant tweaking the RPGA has been engaged in over the past year, they'd be less so. The WotC people do feel more of a desire to tinker with the rules and fix problems that way than TSR ever did. This time, they've created a whole 40 page, 10 chapter free downloadable rulebook to detail all the things they're doing to keep the living campaign from breaking under the strain of thousands of groups, many of which are actively trying to twink their characters. Hopefully that'll keep things stable at least until the 3.5 books drop, at which point they'll pretty much have to update their house rules. Yet again, I'm left feeling they have a job I don't envy one little bit, like trying to herd cats that are constantly looking for nastier claw sheaths and grills for their teeth. Seems like the more I see of organised play, the less I want anything to do with it. Places of mystery: The Dragonshead Barrows are a collection of tombs in the hills near Irongate. They still have a reasonable number of unlooted ones, but they're currently right in the middle of a goldrush of adventurers, so that may not last. Still, since many of them are well hidden up there, some will probably remain unfound, ready to ignite more legends in the future. Yet again, they're engaging in worldbuilding that justifies a world with large numbers of adventuring parties active simultaneously, with varying levels of success. Well, with the living campaign going on, I guess they've got too really for it to make any sense. The Hool Beacon is the place where an old adventure took place. What happened to Baltron, and why does it no longer bear his name? I guess that's a definite mystery for your players to solve, so this column is living up to it's name. If only there were more creatures from the elemental plane of ooze for DM's to include here.</blockquote>

Verification