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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6267572" data-attributes="member: 27780">Best of Dragon Magazine 1part 6/6Solo DUNGEONS & DRAGONS Adventures: Now this is one article that remains pretty firmly embedded in my mind. The biggest and most interesting article from the first strategic review, I've got a fair amount of use from it over the past 5 years, and it remains useful in other editions, and even other RPG's entirely. Sometimes, you just don't have time to generate a map, and this does the job, even if the results are sometimes a little strange. And of course, sometimes you want that strangeness, as generating random results and then trying to retrofit some logic to them is a fun mental exercise. This is one article that completely deserves it's place here, quite possibly with even higher billing, because it is just so very useful and stimulating. It's just so much easier to be creative when you aren't working in vacuum, with no directions or limitations. Lycanthropy: The Progress of the Disease: Or goddamnit, don't turn my character into an NPC just as they're getting interesting. Goes to show, right from the beginning, we had to deal with the battle between those who wanted more cool character options, and those who wanted to stick to the rules as written. Of course, in a magazine that constantly needs to deliver new stuff to remain valid, it's obvious who is going to win. Still, as characters lose as many powers as they gain, or more in the case of spellcasters, and it takes a long time to gain complete control over your transformations, I don't think this counts as overpowered. It's certainly no Werewolf: the Apocalypse, but it'll do for now. The Japanese Mythos:  Now here's a great example of the sheer density they could pack in in the old days, before they decided to have bigger typefaces and pad things out with artwork. A mix of 66 gods, monsters,. heroes and magical items in three and a half pages? That's pretty cool, actually. You know, if they'd gone the other way, and worked on communicating information even more succinctly instead of letting page counts balloon over the years, they could have increased that by a few more orders of magnitude. But that would require a strong pressure to keep page counts low, and we live in times where things like that are cheap and reproduction of information is even cheaper. Maybe if civilisation collapsed, but then we'd have more important things to do than preserving the art of roleplaying. Anyway, the density of the statblocks really makes sense here, since you can look up the finer details of japanese mythology on your own power. I approve, and many modern articles could learn from it. Random Monsters: Even after only 5 years, D&D had already gone through a fair amount of evolution, and some players had become both experienced and genre-savvy. This certainly applies to the much-missed Paul Crabaugh, who would certainly have contributed a good deal more over the years if he'd lived. Here's one of his early contributions. While it allows a fair amount of randomness, it still shows the limitations of being an early bit of design, with the types of monsters and their capabilities being fairly bounded, rather than truly scary, alien, and open-ended. That said, things like immunity to nonmagical weapons and instadeath poison are pretty nasty, but it's nothing worse than existing monsters. So this is fairly fair by the standards of the day, and players should be able to survive even these monsters if they play smart and don't just attack everything head-on. It just about stands the test of time. D&D Option: Demon Generation: We end with a second variation on the same theme, this time by an official writer. Curiously, this is actually less balanced, and more likely to produce gonzo overpowered results than the third party one, as demons get very substantial amounts of spell-like abilities, some of which are far better and more flexible than others. These won't be an appropriate challenge until your group is pretty high level. So like Gary's official classes compared to the other ones introduced in the magazine, this is a case where the third party stuff turns out superior, or at least more usable in actual play. Definitely worth noting. Well, this was certainly a huge breath of fresh air after the 3e years, covering a wider range of topics, and considerably less bound to seriousness and orthodoxy of design. On the other hand, it was very much dominated by Gary and Jim Ward, and both their good and bad aspects were in full play here, unrestrained by the hands of editors. It goes to show, there are good and bad parts to both approaches. As usual, I'm just grateful at this point I can pick and choose the bast aspects of them all. Now let's see what lessons they learned from it, and how they refined the format in the next four best of's.</blockquote>

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