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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6091214" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 309: July 2003part 2/9Scale Mail: We start off with a letter wishing the new spells in issue 304 would appear in the new corebook. Sorry. They might still show up in a supplement though. More than a few will. The problem of monster CR's is brought up, particularly ones with templates. Yup, results in play can vary widely based on party composition, tactics and terrain. This is never going to be an exact science, despite serious efforts by some designers to push it into shape. The readers continue to be in a critical mood, with someone deeply annoyed at Gary's love of adversarial play. Sssh. He secretly wants them to win, but don't let them know that or they'll get overconfident. And we finish with a letter pointing out that one of Mearl's power plays from 307 uses an inaccurate interpretation of the rules. I am shocked that there is gambling in this establishment. Truly shocked, I tell you. 3.5 Update: Time to get into these changes big time, get them over and done with. Nerfs to spell durations I already know about. I'd rather fix them by upping the component cost than cutting the duration and effectiveness, but I can quite understand why they went down this route. The skill revisions, on the other hand, I have no problem with. Folding overly narrow skills into other ones, and generally reducing restrictions on who can take what definitely feels like a good change to me. Similarly, the minor changes to weapons, armor, and racial abilities, with the possible exception of gnomes losing their illusion speciality are all good. Giving classes better high level abilities is a definite good idea, even if it doesn't really catch the nonspellcasters up with good ol' CoDzilla. So looking through this, I'm surprised how many of these changes make perfect sense and were adopted without complaint, with only a few of them going the wrong way for my preferences. Guess it's a case of taking for granted what works and blowing the things that don't out of proportion. In any case, this leaves me feeling far happier than most of the teasers did, after being reminded of the little changes that just made things smoother. It's those ones that resulted in 3.5 mostly superseding 3.0, to the point where it's even harder to find a specifically 3.0 game than a 2e one these days, (but you can get the books really cheap) while 3.5 and pathfinder both have strong playerbases devoted to them. There are benefits to a playtester base of millions, you just need to make sure you filter out the noise correctly.</blockquote>

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