Brudewollen said:
Like pretty much everyone else I agree, the Dragon article was a huge disappointment and part of the reason I stopped reading the magazine. I was already on the fence, I thought it was going downhill for quite some time, but that pretty much sealed it and I didn't renew my subscription.
Silly Brudewollen! I stopped subscribing to Dragon in December.
It wasn't worth reading
then.
The NPCs from the book were terrible conversions, they made no sense at all. My biggest problem though was how they treated magic. I was hoping for a fairly indepth article or section of how to deal with A) the very small level of magic in Westeros and B) the slowly increasing power of magic in the world as the story progresses. Instead we got a tiny sidebar that gave three very simplistic options. If memory serves the first was not to allow magic in the game at all except to NPCs, thus every PC has to be a class with no magic or you remove casting abilities from Rangers and such. The second I think suggesed some maximum levels of magic, like 3rd or 5th casting levels, the problem is that this is still way more powerful (or at least fantastical) then in the novels. The third option was the worst of all, "just play D&D rules, but set it in Westeros" or some such nonsense. Totally misses the point of adventuring in that setting.
I just bought this from a retail store, being that I'm a big GRRM fan and at the very least I'd read the interview. Most of the game conversion stuff was, shall we say charitably, a liberal interpretation of the novels and how they might be converted to D20. I was very disappointed and baffled at some choices.
However, it wasn't entirely bad and with a bit of rationalization the characters can work. Dany's spell choices are bizarre, but consider that she always has a dragon nearby. Each of her spells can be construed as the result of a dragon's senses or effects... OK, well most of 'em. If you
had to use that version of F&I, it's not impossible.
Of course it's not recommended, either.
Bran-as-druid makes no sense at all, but there was only the one prestige class and cool effects like Bran's can't be simulated using D&D as published.
One of the other options was appealing: each character has 25% of the gear "normal" for a character of that level. It still doesn't work well without a wholesale revision of the D&D system, but the RP sections of the section weren't total poop.
Now, the rest of the magazine is just as bad as it was... though Johnn Four's articles are always entertaining (which is why I subscribe to his newsletter).
Here's to hoping GoO can publish this on time. I'm still waiting for D20 Mecha...
- Ketjak
