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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6278690" data-attributes="member: 27780">Best of Dragon Magazine 5part 4/4Magic for merchants: Len Lakofka disappeared from the magazine at the same time Gary did, so even if there had been more best of's, he probably wouldn't have been in them. Not that I would have missed him anyway, as this is another of his contributions that I really can't see myself using. The Merchant class wasn't particularly useful anyway, and this system to give them minor magical abilities is pretty vague, plus the basic assumptions behind it don't really work anywhere but old school D&D, so it's not useful for converting either. Probably best left in the slush pile, really. Spell strategy: As with the random library books article, this is the kind of article that's a lifesaver in the right situations, particularly if you have random encounters in your game. It would be very boring if every wizard you encounter unleashes the same spells in the same order, especially as you never know how much of their reserves they have left, or what they might be expecting to deal with later. Roll away, and if it throws up an unexpected result, go with it, try and turn it to their best advantage as a combatant. You'll probably learn more about tactics that way than always spending hours carefully building encounters under tightly controlled circumstances, and have more fun too. Now, if only we had an updated equivalent for 3e, where the spell list can get even more cumbersome at high level. Good hits and bad misses: Ah yes, critical hits. Surprised it took them this long to put them in the best of. But then that was the kind of thing that a vocal section of the public wanted, but the official writers really weren't that keen on, so while they may have experimented with it a bit, they tried to play it down, leave that to Rolemaster. Still, here they are, for those of you who do want the frisson of knowing you could get your skull crushed or your head lopped off at any time. Like the weapon breakage rules, I'd rather pass, but more power to you if you do. See you in the afterlife, sooner or later. Remember, this is not a case where the first to arrive is the winer. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> The astral plane: Now this is one that totally deserves to be here, and I'm only surprised they didn't put the 9 hells ones in the best of's too, given how unanimously it was praised. I guess it probably comes down to space again, since that was a three part, 40-odd page piece that would still eat up nearly half a best of even without the artwork. They'd have to do a whole planar themed book to make that worth their while, and they already had more comprehensive plans on that front. This is another one that hasn't aged brilliantly, partly due to the fact that they left out the adventure from the original magazine, partly due to the loss of formatting in the name of space, and partly in comparison to the longer and more atmospheric portrayal in the Planescape books. Spending more than half your page count on detailing how specific spells and magical items are altered by being in another universe rather than just giving general principles definitely feels like more of a drag second time around. This is still cool as inspiration, but I wouldn't want to go back and run an astral adventure using only the information in here. This issue doesn't have many recent articles, and feels like them going through and compiling "the best of the rest", whatever is left over after the themes of the last three best of's. As such, I can quite understand why they stopped doing them at this point, even without the management changes. If they'd done them every 4-5 years, they could have kept them up indefinitely, but they had to rush them for more short term profit, not knowing if D&D would last, or it was just a fad. Such are the follies of history. And so that's the end of that. Just one more to go. Time to skip forward 20 years, and see how the idiosyncrasies of the mid noughties have fared in hindsight.</blockquote>

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