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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6102983" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 311: September 2003part 6/9Hee. Dead PC Portraits. Nodwick might not see the funny side. Once again, they make me miss dragonmirth, which reminded them every month not to take things too seriously. Fiction: Guinevere's fate by Ben Bova. Orion's stories in the magazine come to an unsatisfying end with a piece that continues and builds on the previous instalments, but doesn't really conclude anything, which probably means he intended to write more, but never got round to it, or was put off by some policy change in the magazine. Are we going to see another editor switch sometime soon perhaps? Anyway, as the title says, this is where we finally introduce Guinevere, and Arthur gets close to becoming high king. Which once again shows the liberties he's taking with the legend, as we've got a whole ton of stuff happening before we even get to the meat of the source material. And as usual, he wins the battles, but is left unsure if he's winning the war or not, given all the Creator politics on both sides. So this is pretty decent as a middle to a larger story, but crap as an ending, leaving all the plot threads hanging. Still, Googling shows that Orion and King Arthur eventually came out as a full book in 2011, so I presume he did eventually finish this arc of short stories in a satisfactory fashion. You'll just have to shell out for that if you want to find out where it goes after this. The play's the thing: Of all the basic character classes, fighters are probably the most flexible?! :Jaw Drops: ………… Excuse me for a moment. Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!! Ahem. So yeah, Mike Mearls engages in a bit of epic fail this month, either completely not knowing how 3e turns out in actual play, or lying through his teeth to try and convince us to keep playing fighters despite all the better alternatives. 10 bonus feats as their only special abilities, and a crap skill selection means they actually have the least amount of selectable widgets by 20th level. Even Paladins and Monks have more if you use the ability to swap out class features, and the ones they do have scale far better. And to top it off, the advice he gives about fighter archetypes is very similar to the specialist fighter ideas last issue, only with fewer of them covered, in less detail, and without the mechanical backup as well. So this article really does fail on both the writing and the editorial levels, and never should have appeared in this issue so close to the other one, where all it's failings are thrown into really sharp relief. Screw that noise.</blockquote>

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