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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6134187" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 319: May 2004part 2/8Zogonia are still not getting along after last month's adventure. Maybe they'll get along better with the hot drow chick. Up on soapbox: Gary's delivers his final story this month, the tale of how the first dual-class character was created. As is often the case, it involved a bit of exception based design that did not follow the rules that the books would later use. Erac's Cousin was forced to switch from magic-user to fighter when he was accidentally transported to Barsoom, where his magic didn't work, but his physical capabilities were superhuman compared to the low-gravity natives. Unlike the later rules, he got to choose which class he wanted to use and gain experience in for a particular adventure, rather than being stuck with the new one until it surpassed the levels of the old one. Once again, the fact that the rules were still being created allowed characters to do things they'd never get away with these days, unless your DM also isn't playing by RAW. So I guess we'll leave this by wondering if you'll have more fun not strictly playing by the rules. Unless you're in large scale tournament play, you'll get more out of the game if you put your own ideas into it as well. Be a creator, not just a consumer. Struggling to survive in a savage world: Let's get this show on the road, because we'll run out of water if we hang around. First up, the races. We get all the ones from the old dark sun books, plus Elan and Maenads from the new Psionics handbook detailed. Like the old Dark Sun books, they aren't the same as standard ones, with even humans being beefed up into an LA+1 race. Combine this with the default starting level being 4, and this means most PC's start with 3 class levels like in the original, and eliminates a lot of the problems higher-powered races face in regular campaigns. So this is both fairly faithful to the original, and makes some effort to make them more balanced with each other, (which is an argument for higher default starting power level as it gives you more leeway as a designer) and while it does introduce some new stuff, it integrates it into the setting and doesn't try to cram in everything from the new XPH. And Gnomes are still extinct. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> So far, definitely so good. Heroes of a dying world: The classes, on the other hand, get treated in a way that feels pretty half-assed. In 2e, clerics and rangers had very different spell lists, Bards eschewed spellcasting for encyclopaedic poison knowledge, and wizards, hoo boy. Here, nearly all of this gets blanded out, they don't go to any effort to explain how the setting is changed by the Sorcerer/Wizard divide in 3e, Paladins are plonked back in without thought to their power source, and they don't even bother to make a separate Gladiator class. It feels like no effort was put into this article at all, which is very strange given it has the same author as last one. I guess we know where David Noonan's priorities lie then.</blockquote>

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