Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6265564" data-attributes="member: 27780">Best of Dragon Magazine 1part 2/6The Play's the Thing: Ha. I'd forgotten they'd used this article title before Robin Laws so comprehensively made it his own. It's amusing because this is the kind of advice that might have seemed ground-breaking at one point, but we now take it for granted. Invest a little personality into your characters, and make them more than just avatars for fighting and exploration. Very valid when you've been wargaming for years, and view roleplaying as an evolution of that, but oddly enough, something new players are likely to do without even thinking about it. Definitely one of the stranger things about the hobby and how it originated. Languages: Ah yes, the whole languages rigamarole in OD&D. You got a set amount based on your intelligence, plus a few extra if a demihuman, and that was it, since they had yet to introduce a skill system. Most races only had a single language that everyone spoke. And they never did entirely clear up what the hell alignment tongues were. This can lead to both frustration and amusing parody, as the whole ability to speak Were-St-Bernard indicates. Definitely don't miss this bit of clunkiness, and it definitely reminds me why many people found Runequest preferable as soon as it came out. There are just so much more elegant ways of handling the communication business. The Development of Towns in D&D: A second, longer set of worldbuilding advice in pretty much the same vein as Joe Fischer's. Your worldbuilding needs to balance ensuring everything is there for the town to survive, and making things interesting for adventurers. Although, really, there seems to be more emphasis on the logistics side of things than making the town interesting in itself, apart from a section on tavern rumours, showing that they primarily see them as a place to go between dungeon-crawls rather than primary adventure locations in themselves. The days when the monsters come too and live among you are yet to come. So this article reminds me that those were more innocent times, and there's a lot of basic assumptions they have yet to be disabused of. So it goes. Muahahaha.  Let there be a Method to your Madness: This one is also an expansion of the same things said just a few pages ago, talking about building dungeons by considering who built them and what their purpose (and budget) was. Despite there being far less explored territory, they still wound up rehashing themselves even in the early issues. This is a bit tiresome, especially since I've seen variations on this spiel all down the line. You certainly didn't have to do it twice within the same collection, and lose a mark as editors for that. Designing for Unique Wilderness encounters: This one is ALSO repeating and expanding on Joe Fischer's advice, which makes me think they did this deliberately. Still, at least by offering random terrain generation tables, they're giving more practical assistance than just telling you to think logically about these things, and come up with stuff based on that. But still, this is getting very tiresome, and makes me think this best of could have been even smaller and still retained it's value. NEXT!The Total Person in Metamorphosis Alpha: We already had an article for determining your physical description randomly in MA. Now we expand that, so you can randomly determine your backstory as well. Actually seems like it's more of use to the DM, as they're more likely to need to make a whole batch of NPC's in a hurry. I suppose it demonstrates how different the default was back then, with random generation as standard. Many people took that for granted all through the 80's. It doesn't seem particularly applicable to games other than MA or Gamma World, so I don't think I'll be able to get much use out of it, but it's still interesting as a historical artifact. This is how building a well-rounded character with depth worked back in the day. How Heavy is my Giant: The Square-Cube law is such a damper on our fantastical imaginations. It's also a problem in OD&D in particular because of the bounded ability score ranges, making the difference between human peak and giant strength seem too small, while not allowing for truly gargantuan creatures at all. So this little realism in fantasy article is a somewhat frustrating one to be reminded of, but also fascinating because it goes into a good deal of mathematical detail that the D&D rules just can't match up to. You have writers making up monster descriptions on the fly, and then you have to deal with the logical consequences, which can be rather a headache. This is really a precursor to the Ecologies, examining how a monster fits into the world, and how devastating they could really be to the environment. (including the formula for how deep their footprints would be) It's another thing they haven't done in quite a while, and I'm surprised they lost interest in, since you can go endlessly down the rabbit hole by examining the logical consequences of things. Oh well, we'll always have the ones that do exist, and there are plenty of them.</blockquote>

Verification