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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6109083" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 312: October 2003part 8/9The play's the thing: Playing with people around the world has really evolved over the years, and here's the latest check-in. The internet has reached a form recognisable in the modern day, but the actual specific websites are very different. It's a lot harder to get someone to reveal their real identity, which means if someone drops out and disappears, it's really hard to find them again. Newsgroups and email lists are still a thing that many people use, and aren't too terrible at running games in as long as you have some form of dice roller you trust. Cartography and battlemap software are options, but they will set you back a fair amount, and require you to be a techie sort. Actually, this raises an interesting point in that the DM will also be expected to be the person who chooses and knows the ins and out of the technological platform you're using, and how this could be offputting to someone who isn't. The age of iDevices and touchscreens bringing a new leap in casual user-friendliness is still a few years away. It's the little differences that'll really catch you out. So this is one of those looks at the outside world that come less and less frequently these days. As such, it's pretty welcome. Dungeoncraft: If you're going to be spending a lot of time in dungeons, you really need to give them plenty of variety. Here Monte gives us lots of example environments and how they'll affect the play. Caves go off the grid and slope and twist unpredictably. Ruins have irregular walls and substantial open areas. Water and Sky dungeons open up all manner of 3D possibilities. Going extradimensional lets you give the finger to Euclid, and quite possibly Newton as well. (Einstein goes without saying, since I've never seen relativity used properly in an rpg, and I'm not even sure it's possible. ) And you can combine several ideas as well, having a partly submerged ruin in a volcanic caldera on a flying island, for example. Like last issue, most of these ideas are familiar, but they haven't all been gathered in one place before. The real world on it's own is full of rarely used hostile terrains to steal, and there's plenty of others to add. Whether the players will think of them as the dungeon, or the wilderness you travel to get to the dungeon is very much a matter of presentation. And I think with this number of ingredients you can combine them to create a unique challenge or two.</blockquote>

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