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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6148294" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 323: September 2004part 3/8A novel approach: Their new books column is another one that starts off with slightly irritating pure self-promotion. They're launching a new series of D&D novels not set in the existing settings, and oriented at a younger crowd, in the hope of sucking in a new generation. Which can't have worked brilliantly, given the still ageing roleplaying demographics, but since they continued publishing stuff in this imprint regularly until 2011 can't have been a complete flop either. Completely unsurprisingly, the new crunch is conversions of the characters and a magic item from the book. Each of them is level 1, and together they make up a fairly decent starter party, if somewhat more socially focussed than most. They obviously want to downplay the violent side of D&D for the sake of being family friendly. I can see the formulas going full force on this one, so it leaves me feeling very cynical indeed. Definitely not the best way to start off a column when there are so many more distinctive fantasy worlds out there to choose from. Silicon sorcery, on the other hand, chooses a very big name for conversion. Chocobos from Final Fantasy! They come in a wide range of colours, are fairly cute, and a few of them can fly. They really do fit into D&D perfectly, which makes sense given the number of FF monsters that were converted from D&D in the first place. They're probably slightly easier to take into dungeons than horses, and being able to double your movement rate for extended periods of time certainly doesn't hurt. I am mildly amused by this, and definitely approve of the idea. (moogles, on the other hand…… ) People who dismiss all anime out of hand because of the visual style are missing out on a lot of cool stuff that's very appropriate for D&D. Someone ought to do an anime style conversion of the temple of elemental evil so Lareth the Beautiful can get the number of fangirls he truly deserves. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> Zogonia mark their territory. Wandering monsters may get annoyed by this. Nodwick has a public service announcement to make. Dork tower tries to fix their group dynamics and fail again. Samurai vs Knight: Well, this is certainly a harder fight to decide than Elminster vs Raistlin. The elite warrior classes of two very different cultures that existed at around the same time, and with tech levels not so far apart as to be obviously overpowering. There's certainly room for a good deal of debate there, because there's a ton of variables. Precise time period, environment, home team advantage, if they're fighting in melee or on horseback, if each is fighting fair by their own particular standards, you can consider them all, and never come to a solid answer. Because really, it would depend on the luck and skill of the specific individuals, and even if there were statistical trends, there would still be many exceptions to the rule. So no solid answers here, and I can't help feeling it would be a more entertaining read as an actual forum thread where people genuinely do have polarised opinions, rather than one person being even-handed and researching both meticulously. This is interesting because it's different from the usual fare they serve us, but still feels like a bit of a white elephant, as I'm really not sure what to do with it. Do they plan to do any more? What other iconic comparisons are there to make? Do they have the courage to do a wizards vs sorcerers (or wizards vs fighters, which would be even more telling) one and pick apart the problems in their own game? I guess we'll see soon enough.</blockquote>

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