Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6171852" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 331: May 2005part 2/7First watch is cut this month, as whoever made the ad free scan decided this counts as adverts. While I may not totally disagree with that assessment, it's still rather annoying. The point of pole arms: Back to this topic again huh? Although actually, articles on polearms are far less common than either guns or gods, or even Elf-made magical items for that matter. It's just that the articles we did get were so front-loaded that anyone perusing the magazines from the beginning gets a distorted picture, with ones in Strategic Reviews 2 & 4, and Dragon 22, 64 & 178. They haven't done one since the 3e edition change, so this is well worth revisiting. The real advantage of polearms in 3e isn't the high damage scores, but that most of them have Reach, so if you have a well built party, you can get in more attacks without making so many party members vulnerable, and have lots of fun with attacks of opportunity when the enemy tries to retreat. Of course, this works best with groups considerably bigger than 4, and requires working on tactics as a group, so you can see why it isn't as popular an attack method as it should be. Along with talking about existing polearms, including collecting quite a few from various supplements, there's the obligatory new feats, some of which are cool, and some which are thoroughly banal and you ought to be able to try anyway, albeit at a penalty. While you might be able to have some fun in actual play with these tricks, it doesn't make for particularly interesting reading, showing that some things haven't changed since the old days. I wonder if they'll find room to squeeze in a similar article in the 4e issues. Alchemical Charms: Unlike polearms, holy symbols & water, wolfsbane and garlic remain fairly entrenched in the public consciousness. The idea that some monsters are vulnerable to particular things that regular humans can just shrug off is an important step in teaching children that monsters can be beaten, you just need to use your brains instead of just brute force. It makes sense to extend these kinds of vulnerabilities to other creature types. Unfortunately, they choose to go the route of padded out formulaic waffle, taking 4 pages to say what they could easily have done in one by having a whole bunch of types of charms with identical effects, only against different creatures, and repeating the full text in the description of each. If there was one old school virtue they conspicuously haven't brought back with the revamp, it's using their limited space in the most efficient manner. Which is a real shame when you're dealing with equipment, as knowledge of ergonomics is invaluable for packing as many things at once without it impeding you too much, and in a way that makes them easy to get out again when needed. It's also disappointing given the reminder of many real world mythological monster's idiosyncratic weaknesses just a couple of months ago. So yeah, they should have either cut the crap, or made the effort to make each subtype's implementation interestingly different to make this a good article.</blockquote>

Verification