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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6273661" data-attributes="member: 27780">Best of Dragon Magazine 3part 6/6Cantrips for the illusionist: Even more than regular wizards, illusionists benefit from having an array of tricks that are low-key, but incredibly useful when applied cleverly. So this little symmetry filler also comes as welcome here, even if the tendency to make spell components into bad puns does date this a little. If you want to avoid them seeing through your tricks, you will need to practice the art of misdirection, or make sure you're safely offstage while an accomplice draws all the attention and looks like they're doing miracles. Just the way it should be, really. Spell books: Gary's given us a few enhancements. Now for the counterbalance, this piece spelling out exactly how expensive and inconvenient wizard's spell books are, how much of a pain it is to lose them (and how awesome it is to get hold of an enemy's one) and how much they will charge to cast spells for hire. (which if you're playing by RAW, they'll then have to plough into training costs and the creation of new spellbooks <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=":)" /> ) The tiresome stuff that keeps spellcasters from getting out of hand, you don't want to go into too much detail on it, but we've seen what happens when you remove it. Just the nature of the game. Sigh. CREATING NEW CHALLENGES: We finish the issue with a half-hearted grab-bag of one new race, and two new classes. Not really one thing or t'other, but I guess they had a fixed page count and needed to fill it. Plus most of the new classes they'd done recently were the ones Gary did, and would later put in Unearthed Arcana. He obviously had bigger plans for them than just a magazine reprint. The winged folk: Ah yes, the winged folk. Time has not changed just how ridiculously overpowered these guys look compared to standard demihuman races, with better ability scores, more innate abilities and higher level limits than even elves. If they'd been picked up and ran with by other writers, they could have been a real problem. Thankfully, the official writers continued to be conservative about creatures with natural flight or water-breathing becoming PC's, leaving the winged folk as just an interesting footnote in the annals of gaming. It's almost a relief really, given how much harder it is to design adventures when one of the PC's has powers like that. The alchemist: Now if the winged folk were overpowered, the alchemist still looks amusingly underpowered compared to regular wizards, although this is compensated by their equally low XP tables. Still, at least they're a proper functional NPC class, which you certainly couldn't say for Scribes, and the things they make can be pretty handy in adventures. Ironically, their smaller XP tables means they'll actually be able to take more hits than a regular wizard of the same XP, and being able to get acid and flaming oil at trade prices is not to be sneezed at. But they're still best kept in the backline, as a secondary character or hireling in a large party, just as you wouldn't want to play a single-class aristocrat or expert in 3e. The archer: Time has mellowed me in one respect, in that the Archer no longer looks so annoying in hindsight. While still slightly cooler than regular Rangers, the greater awareness of just what regular primary spellcasters do to the game at high levels make their bag of tricks seem like just another day at the office, with the main irritation being the hinky archer-ranger setup, which would also be used in the cavalier-paladin. Go ahead, pincushion a few enemies. You have my blessing. Well, this was certainly an improvement on the second best of, bringing in contributions from a wider range of writers, and rules that are considerably more solid than the first two best of's. Goes to show how much evolving they did in the early 80's, as they expanded and brought in new fans. So it'll be interesting to see whether the next one sees the pace of change accelerate further, or slow down again. Time for another leapfrog forward, this time to the middle of 1985 to see what they considered worth keeping that time.</blockquote>

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