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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6073374" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 304: February 2003part 8/9Dork tower fails to effectively manage their time. Dungeoncraft: Monte decided he's going to do extended multi-part bits of advice after all, starting with some info on city designing. This is another of those cases where you can wind up under or overdesigning all too easily, either making tons of detail that never gets used in actual play, or not having some crucial bit of info on hand and having to grind to a halt if you can't improvise it. So I guess the important thing to do is predict if they'll be sticking around in an area, or just passing through. Not an easy task, and one highly dependent on if you're running a plot-centric or sandbox game, and how likely players are to follow obvious plot hooks that are dangled in front of them rather than doing their own thing or coming up with unpredictable solutions to problems. Ironically, this means that the tighter the control the DM has over the party, the less extraneous worldbuilding they're likely to need to do. I never thought of it that way before. Monte obviously does have some insights to offer that Ray didn't. Good to see this column becoming useful to me again. DM's toolbox: We had some relatively simple advice about playing NPC's last month. Now Johnn gives us the advanced course. While the advice is in his usual crisp bullet-pointed style, each of the individual steps will require a fair amount of thinking about and following them all will result in a pretty detailed and well-rounded character. So it's the kind of approach that'll be hard work, especially if you apply it to more than just the important NPC's, but that'll get good results if you do. Not all of their articles are aimed at people who've only got the core books and haven't necessarily played much, which is always pleasing for me to see. I just have to hope I won't run out of inspiration or the will to engage in self-examination, both of which never get any easier no matter how long I do them.</blockquote>

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