Rant About Recent Dungeon Magazines

[billbo]

Roncer,

Thanks. Maybe I will.


By the way, I guess I missed a simple word to describe the sort of "Beer and Pretzels" game that Dungeon hasn't done for a while:

The One Shot.

God, I love one-shots. Instead of trying to do full new RPG's every three months, break them up with fun, dumb one-shots. Just silly games that can't hold the interest for terribly long but will be fun as hell to play at least once.

Although the game's obviously been done, the Massive Ordinance game -- was that the name? I mean the game where you play a third grader in a school that's been taken over by demons, and you just happen to have access to a top secret army base's special weaponry-- that's the sort of game/module hybrid I mean. It's just a few new rules, an outlandish premise, a map, and some monster counters. And you run it one night out of the box, and you have a blast. It's basically just the standard D&D rules, but in a novel, maybe comical setting.

 

[rounser]

the concept I'm getting at is a sort of blend between a real different "minigame" and a conventional adventure module. It's a bit of both-- it's really just an adventure module using the basic D&D rules, but you present a BIT of new rules that suit the genre. (In our Horror game, for example, we present rules for Fear, the rule that stipulates that a lumbering hulk of a mental patient can keep up with a running teenager just by walking at a deliberate pace, etc.-- minor tweaks, but no reinventing the wheel.) And so someone can just open the magazine up and run a module in a different time period/genre than medieval fantasy.

Gah, that's another great idea, and in a way, it's something people have been asking for when they say "more support for the minigames". If the minigames are designed as one-shots with an integrated adventure, then they'd seem a lot less theoretical and academic and a lot more practical than they do.

It reminds me of a discussion of how the Call of Cthulhu rulebooks provide adventures so you can "see how to use" it, whereas without the example of how to map the genre to an RPG adventure, such an oddball genre would probably get read and sit on the shelf significantly more.

 

[billbo]

I mean, you could do a serious sort of one-shot about Vikings (both a game and splatbook about Viking culture, etc.); you could follow that up with a funny one-shot about modern college students being catapulted back into the Age of the Dinosaurs (although there'd be furry monkey-men there, too), etc.

 

[billbo]

"It reminds me of a discussion of how the Call of Cthulhu rulebooks provide adventures so you can "see how to use" it, whereas without the example of how to map the genre to an RPG adventure, such an oddball genre would probably get read and sit on the shelf significantly more."

Exactly. Look, no one is really willing to invest TOO much prep-time into running some oddball genre game. So when you present "The Iron Lords of Jupiter" sans a premade adventure ready to run, most people are just going to skip it.

Now, of course, the adventure part takes valuable page space, so you can't do a full minigame -- with character class information and skills and feats and the like -- in addition to the adventure. But I can only say: Good riddance! I can't bear to see my time and magazine-dollar wasted with another description of what "Adaptive Learning" is: i got it the first ten times.

So give us only the tiniest of tweaks to standard D&D rules, and then give us a setting-cum-module-cum-game.

Like Heavy Ordnance. Okay, you can't do Heavy Ordnance; copyright and all. But that KIND of idea.

The Mummy's Tomb. An Enter the Dragon style martial arts tournament (with murders and such going on in background). Etc. There are a lot of little genres people want to play, but just aren't really worth a full game.

 

[Teflon Billy]

Finally, a thoughtful "we screwed up" response from Paizo, but methinks it comes as too little, too late. The damage is done, and there is no way to make either the pro or anti-Poly crowd happy so long as they are in the same magazine...

Hmm.

I know I don't speak for everyone, but this certainly isn;t my point of view at all. I quite like some of the stuff in Poly, on about the same scale that I like some of the stuff in Dungeon.

I really liked both Omega World and Iron Lords of Jupiter...I was lukewarm on Gumball Rally or whatever it was called, but certainly don't think that it's "dragging it out, letting it die a messy death and generating mountains of bad memories" or anything of the sort.

I really liked Dungeon of the Fire Opal and a couple of other items, but have never been truly enraged by the lack in quality.

I think one FR Adventure as the sole Module in an issue is not a great idea, but guess what? So does the editor.

I hope Dungeon stays around. I think, if nothing else Dungeon has been exploring it's boundaries a bit since Mr. Mona took the helm, and if the results have been mixed, at least we know it's because an effort is being made to try something new occasionally instead of just staying the course.

I'd much rather have an Iron Lords of Jupiter than any number of Armistice quality modules.

I'm glad the Editorial Staff responds to reader criticism as quickly and efficiently as they do, but I would hate to think that shrill, overstated whining about the magazine being "not worth saving" does not drive them to never try a single new idea again.

Becasue frankly, I have enough "Dungeon-Crawl-by-theNumbers" product to last me a lifetime.

Hell, Jamis Buck has made it possible for me to generate it in basically no time

 

[billbo]

Part of the promise, I thought, of the Open Game d20 movement, was that we could stop writing new rules for every damn variant game and just use the basic D&D or d20 Modern rules.

And yet every time I open Polyhedron, I'm looking at a new rewrite of the PH.

 

[Darrin Drader]

I'm glad the Editorial Staff responds to reader criticism as quickly and efficiently as they do, but I would hate to think that shrill, overstated whining about the magazine being "not worth saving" does not drive them to never try a single new idea again.

Becasue frankly, I have enough "Dungeon-Crawl-by-theNumbers" product to last me a lifetime.

Truer words I have never heard. Please continue to experiment, push the boundaries, but keep it a magazine that we recognize.

 

[Teflon Billy]

"Well, Christian, you publish a zine and it probably sucks, too."

Of course it does. It's a zine. I'm an amateur. It's a fun liitle project. They get $6-7/issue and they are the Official D&D Rags. So what's their excuse?

I don't think Scrollworks sucks. The issue I read didn't have a lot of mechanical use to me, but it was damn funny

I particularly liked the "scenery" tht came for use with miniatures. A little fold up cardboard cube for use as a "Packing Crate" a "Treasure Chest" or what have you.

Damn funny stuff

Actually, now that I think of it, i think I actually used the little folding thing at some point

 

[Darrin Drader]

Part of the promise, I thought, of the Open Game d20 movement, was that we could stop writing new rules for every damn variant game and just use the basic D&D or d20 Modern rules.

And yet every time I open Polyhedron, I'm looking at a new rewrite of the PH.

That isn't entirely true in either respect. D20 was developed to create a baseline standard so that everyone doesn't have to learn a whole new set of rules to run a new genre. At the same time, different tech levels and different societal factors (for lack of a better term) come into play with each genre. Because of this, you pretty much do need to make some changes whenever you write up a different genre. You couldn't run the same characters in Star Wars as you could in Modern, and for good reason.

Despite this, I think it a good idea for modern, near modern, or future games to make the effort to stay as true to D20 Modern as possible and then add in the variant rules. The Omega World game I recently ran used the standard D20 Modern character types, and then I came up with a method for including mutations without killing game balance. It worked well.

 

[billbo]

I don't see the need to create "new" (actually, not new, just rehash) character classes every time they create a new setting.

One of these days, I'd like to see them just say, "Look, all characters are third level fighters. They can choose their three feats from either the D&D PH or from the list of special world-specific feats given below. Now, here's the world/scenario they'll be adventuring in."