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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6134712" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 319: May 2004part 3/8Tempered by a burning world: The equipment, at least, remains much the same as in 2e. Gold and silver will go 100 times as far as in most settings, if you can find somewhere with enough decent stuff to pay for it in the first place. The weapons and armor suuuuck, which compensates for the higher starting level and ability scores. You can pretty much throw out the idea of recommended treasure per level. On the other hand, there are plenty of giant insects that you can use to make chitin armor or shields. (if you can kill them without ruining their shells) Things are generally too tough for civil liberties to gain much traction. (but if you can survive going off into the desert, who's going to chase you? ) So this is somewhere in the middle of the other two articles in quality, simply translating the setting straight, doing what's needed to update it to the new rules. I don't think it gives quite enough info to play it if you don't have the old books, and it doesn't add to the setting, unlike the better articles from 315, so I can't give this themed section hugely high marks. As is the case far too often these days, this is serviceable rather than thrilling. The erudite: (as played by Samuel L Jackson) Now here's an interesting little bit of design experimentation. 3e psions had a lot in common with Sorcerers in that they have a more limited selection of powers than wizards, but can use them more frequently and repeatedly. What would happen if we reverse engineered that process, and created a psionic class that has a greater total selection of powers, and the ability to add more mid-level by training with or scanning the minds of other characters? How would we keep this from being completely overpowered and dominating the game in the same way well-prepared wizards can do? The whole point of psionic characters is their self-contained nature, so they can't have an expensive and losable spellbook as a balancing factor. The answer they chose was twofold. An XP cost for learning each power above the standard ones gained per level. And only being able to manifest a limited selection of the powers you know per day. As is often the case when an idea appears in the magazine and is then put in a book a few years later, there's a whole bunch of subtle mechanical differences. The big one is that they can manifest a number of powers of each level per day exactly equal to a wizard here, rather than the flat 1 +1/2 per level in Complete Psionic. This means they're more powerful here, but also require much more bookkeeping. The xp is also a flat cost here, instead of scaling with level like it does in CP. So this version is a comfortable tier 1 class, only slightly below wizards due to the XP cost becoming negligible at higher level, while the CP version is about balanced with Psions and Sorcerers, with it's initial flexibility at the start of the day nicely counterbalanced with the hard choices you'll have to make in an extended dungeon crawl. Another case where it's very nice to see their design process working.</blockquote>

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