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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6221483" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 345: July 2006part 1/680 (100) pages. The price goes up to $7.99, not even 2 years after the last increase. Yep, they are definitely increasing prices more frequently these days. Remember the 80's. They managed to go nearly a full decade without a price raise. Still, at least we have a sensibly dressed female adventurer for a change after the substantial upsurge of cheesecake on recent covers. But no real background detail again. Still, at least it's another theme they have yet to do this edition. Giants! (last seen in issue 254) Despite being the stars of the first D&D modules ever, and tons of myths, they're actually underrepresented in terms of overall screentime. Let's see just how much useful stuff they've managed to fit in this issue. Scan Quality: Excellent, unindexed, ad-free scan. In this issue:Editorial: Back in issue 326, they tried leaving the big obvious blurbs off the cover to see if they could keep the magazine going without them, the way they did in the 80's. Turns out the answer is no. If they don't keep putting themselves out there and shouting for new readers, they get lost amongst the competition, of which there is a hell of a lot in the internet age. Roleplaying as a whole certainly isn't growing, and that means Dragon has to fight to capture as much of the remaining market as possible. Of course, even if they do have eye-catching covers, the fact that they're completely D&D specific now means it's harder for them to draw in people who have no idea what's going on, unlike when they had fiction, general advice and reviews that a newsstand browser could flick through and understand instantly. So this is a somewhat depressing editorial, even if it tries to be positive about the future. Progress steamrollers a whole bunch of things in it's path. I suppose it's just a good thing that once they went electronic and the covers were purely for people who'd already bought the product, they no longer had to worry about this, and left them off. Scale Mail: Our first letter is the expected criticism of the april issue for not being funny enough. As they've noted many-a-time before, they just can't win on that front. But they can do better than they are now. We get a highly amusing picture of a beholder in a bikini submitted to us, which I must admit is funnier than their attempts this year. Once again this shows the difference between using freelancers and full-time staffers for most of your articles. The freelancers are less likely to be worn down by the daily grind and afraid of losing their jobs for one little bit of silliness. Another regular request is for prints of their artwork. They really ought to put really high-res versions of them up for print on demand. That'd be another way they could make some more long tail money for minimal effort these days. And finally we have a request for more nonstandard classes in Class Acts, and a reminder that people should teach gaming to their kids if they want it to survive in the long-term. Both seem entirely reasonable statements to make.</blockquote>

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