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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6144803" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 322: August 2004part 3/8Collaborative campaign building: Robin Laws has moved on from the magazine, but it seems his influence continues to reverberate, with this little article on blurring the player-DM boundary. The main benefits to allowing your players to join in on the worldbuilding are that it reduces the amount of effort you have to do, and increases the amount of investment and general knowledge they have, allowing them to play off the setting straight away, rather than starting off as wandering marauders each time. Plus if they have particular talents, you can take advantage of that expertise by splitting the labor in an appropriate way. Course, if you're experimenting with stuff like this, you might well be experienced gamers who don't need that crutch to immerse yourself in character, but that won't stop you from doing it for fun. After all, it's not about need, it's about trying new things so gaming doesn't get boring, and having enough trust in your players to not ruin things by metagaming or suggesting silly ideas that'll mess up the setting if implemented. Sometimes too many cooks may spoil the broth, but better to try and see if it works than stay stuck and limited by your own creativity. Shady characters: One thing that's notable about shadows is how gradual and insidious they can be. As the sun sets, they lengthen and deepen, and you don't notice until a sudden chill creeps across your spine. Why shouldn't transforming into a creature of shadow if you spend too long in the plane be a similar process? So this article showcases another rules experiment, breaking up templates in the same way as monster racial classes, and allowing you to develop their powers one level at a time instead of suddenly becoming overpowered and then gradually trending back towards the mean. It also gives us a better idea of exactly what they consider appropriate compensation for a level, when you aren't gaining hit points, skills, BAB, or any of the other basics, and means you can hold off taking all the levels in them until you do have enough regular levels that you don't wind up simultaneously fragile and game-breaking due to your idiosyncratic special powers. So while they may still be a mechanical problem, this makes them less so, and gives players greater freedom still to customise their character, becoming only partly shadow-tainted and maybe deciding to turn back IC as they discover the consequences. Now we just need the retraining rules to fully support that kind of character arc mechanically. Shadows of Undrentide: Even the new computer game is in theme with the issue, which is amusing. Did they plan that well in advance, or did it just happen to turn out that way? The new material is fairly appropriate for the stealth theme, detailing a whole bunch of ways to make your poisons more effective than simply increasing the numbers. Like the disease one three months ago, this sees them recognise that maybe they nerfed this a little too much in 3.5, and there is some serious plot drama involved in having a progressive, hard to fix problem that will only get worse if you don't act fast. The tricky thing is allowing both PC's and enemies access to tricks like this without it feeling unfair or making the game too lethal, for which it would be a very good idea to enforce the cost multipliers they list here strictly. That way, the big plot point poisons can only be pulled out occasionally, rather than resulting in escalation ruining the game. Dork tower deal with the emotional fallout of gaming infidelity. So tragic.</blockquote>

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