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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6274006" data-attributes="member: 27780">Best of Dragon Magazine 4part 1/682 pages. Don't remember seeing this particular dragon before. Is it recycled, or did they actually pay for a new bit of artwork this time around. For a third time, they're giving us a bunch of loosely themed chapters, so they can compile the stuff they liked from the past couple of years, and maybe a few more old ones they missed previous goes around. How have their tastes changed this time? IT TAKES ALL KINDS: One thing remains the same for all these best of's, and that's that there's a ton of demand for new classes. At this point, it feels like virtually every one they published in the magazine gets revisited in here, regardless of quality. I wonder if there'll be any design trends I can spot compared to the previous best of's then, since these will all be fairly recent articles. The bandit: Bandits still look decent enough as an intermediate between ranger and rogue, giving you some thieving skills, some wilderness skills, and good basic fighting ability without adding the supernatural gubbins and strict alignment restrictions that makes rangers problematic for many character concepts. They're entirely suitable as both PC's and NPC's without causing any power balance issues. Absolutely no objection to using them in game. The bounty hunter: Funnily enough, they decide to only reprint one of the three bounty hunter classes from the original issue. Even more strangely, they pick the one that was probably my least favourite, and was certainly the least naturalistic of the classes in terms of abilities, restrictions, and having a worldwide hierarchy with limited places at the top. Really not sure what to make of that decision at all. Goes to show how subjective taste is, and how much one person becoming a regular writer can influence the editors when it comes to choosing these things. Slightly irritating, really. The cloistered cleric: Why would someone want to create a version of a class which is simply inferior to the existing one? It baffles me. I can understand more powerful versions, especially if they're balanced out by higher XP costs and behavioural restrictions, but this stuff? Is it really needed, and is anyone going to get any use out of it? We did get a cool and fairly balanced version of the cloistered cleric in 3e, so some good did come from this article in the long run. But still, this article on it's own is just boring. I remember being regularly irritated by Len's design decisions back in the day, and it looks like that hasn't changed here. The death master: While the cloistered cleric isn't fully functional as a PC, the Death Master is. However the combination of not getting spells until 4th level, and even then, having a quite limited and specialised selection definitely leaves them looking pretty weedy. Until they can amass an army of undead, they're not much of a threat, and even then, they'll be no match for a wizard or cleric who's used their buffing abilities wisely. Once again, it only seems like they got through because their designer was a regular writer for the magazine, and it could have done with a thorough redesigning.</blockquote>

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