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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6151148" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 324: October 2004part 2/8Scale Mail: We start off with a goofy request for a swimsuit issue. Issue 144 sorta does what you want. <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" /> To be honest, they're closer to doing it than they were in the 90's. But it'll still take a fair bit of fan support to get off the ground. Send in your, err, sample artwork now!Completely unsurprisingly after last issue, we have a complaint that they're putting too many blatant tie-ins and shill pieces again. We're already customers, you do not need to push it in our faces like you're desperate, and find it off-putting. As long as they're owned by WotC, there's not much they can do about that. In contrast, we get a short letter from someone who thinks 3.5 is a substantial improvement over 3.0, and people are right to stick with WotC through the years. Flipping back to the negative, we have someone who is seriously cynical about the relaunch, and wishes they'd cover older editions as well. They say as long as the majority of people play the most recent edition, they're going to stick with that. They're going to have to eat those words, 10 years later. The huge map in issue 322 gets praised. Great, another cool feature I didn't get to see. :sigh: And finally, we have another request for Chromatic Dragon PC progressions. Probably next birthday, given their current leadup times. Oh well, 8 months will seem far shorter for me than people waiting at the time. Player initiative: This column looks at girls in gaming again. Despite the proportion of female roleplayers remaining fairly low, there are more games aimed at a female market now, and they're getting more attention in mainstream media. And of course, they're forming relationships. They detail two geeky weddings, complete with photos, which is very amusing. Life goes on, and people raised on RPG's and video games show few signs of abandoning them as an entertainment form as adults. And if they have substantial amounts of purchasing power to make big statements of their fandom like this, that's definitely a positive sign for the future. So it looks like this column does have interesting things to say about gaming that aren't just self-promotion after all. Knowing where we are as a hobby isn't just about what's being released this month. It's about who we've become as people, and a society. (and if you don't understand that, how can you hope to sell successfully to us) <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=":)" /> ) Under command: Time for a good old round of power escalation here, as they release a set of monsters that can beat 100 point warbands singlehandedly, and give you the option for 200 point games as a result. Now you can incorporate things like Vrocks, Erinyes and (medium sized) Elementals into your team. Which still means you're only seeing the mid level monsters, not really impressive guys like pit fiends, great wyrm red dragons or the tarrasque. Maybe next year, if people keep on buying the game and the minis. There's a lot of D&D monsters in the books, and they could gradually add new figures for years to come without hitting diminishing returns if they pace it right. Just got to make sure you mix up the themes and power levels from one pack to the next. I wonder what's next on their agenda. Silicon sorcery: This month's computer game conversion is the Rune Magic system from Gothic II. This is basically an enhanced version of D&D scroll creation, encoding spells into one-shot symbols that can be put on any object and used by anyone, rather than being limited to the appropriate class and anyone who stacks up on Use Magic Device. Which also means they're slightly more expensive to make, but I suppose that's an appropriate balancing factor under the 3.5 rules. (as well as the greater possibility of your enemies stealing your stuff and turning it against you. ) Since you can encode pretty much any spell you know, the tricks you can get up too with this are limited only by your imagination. I can definitely see the value in buying this one, as it'll let you give appropriate spell-like abilities to each member of your party to maximise their effectiveness. Form factor and accessibility does make a real difference, and sacrificing a few xp in the short term will let you earn more faster in the long term.</blockquote>

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