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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6133134" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 318: April 2004part 7/8Under command: After 6 months of little general expansions, they decide to risk taking about campaign play again. They might not have a setting behind the game anymore, but that doesn't mean you can't have a storyline, setting and continuity between your skirmishes. They skip the general advice, which hopefully you know by now, and go for a sample adventure arc, and lots of little bits of crunch to advance your warband with, particularly the group leader who will hopefully develop into a unique character by adding levels and magic items over the course of a campaign. This does ram home just how simplified the skirmish rules are, allowing them to fit a lot of information into just a few of pages. In that way, it's a good callback to the very early days of the magazine, where they could cram a dozen spells onto a single page and have half-page wargaming articles that contributed something meaningful. It's a positive development, and I hope they won't axe the column immediately after this. :/ The play's the thing: Unsurprisingly,  this time Mike examines what a party that's missing an arcane or divine caster feels like. Equally unsurprisingly, it's the lack of a cleric that really reduces the staying power of a party. It's not that you won't feel the pinch from the lack of a wizard as well, especially if you come up against similarly magical and intelligent monsters that use their powers to no-sell straight-up attacks. But healing and magical food creation (if you track rations anyway) make a huge difference ALL the time, as they're significant in every adventure where there's any kind of physical challenge or journeying. And while magic items may replace spell-casters to a degree, the healing ones are much more likely to be limited-use, forcing you to pay for them again and again over the course of a campaign. It's ironic that the class you miss the most if it isn't there is also the one people are most likely to not play because it isn't "cool", and this really is a big flaw in the game design that they have good reason to worry about. (and made a valiant attempt to fix in 4e. ) Course, in 3e, there are tons of classes that don't fit neatly into the striker/defender/controller/leader boxes, and even more prestige classes that consciously combine roles, so you can get by if you try. You'll just have to work a bit harder when the char-op no-brainers are removed.</blockquote>

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