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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4966271" data-attributes="member: 4937">You know me, I just won't let this sort of thing go... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Apparantly, 'classic' and 'golden' means then 'little remembered' and 'poor quality'.  I went back and looked at few in the run from 40-74, and objectively, it's pretty bad.  The layout is very cheap.  The cover art usually appears to be very amateur.  The articles are very uneven, really, no better than the sort of 'fan essays' that you might find at EnWorld, perhaps worse.  The monsters are generally forgetable or forgotten (I didn't remember most of them, and had never used any of them).  Even the typeface is ugly.  It might be a great golden exciting period for the game as a whole, but Dragon in this period seems to me to be very extraneous.A suprising amount of time in the 40-74 period is devoted to articles demonstrating the complete lack of forethought and balance in 1st edition AD&D, and making suggestions as to fix it.  The arguments as to the lack of balance are usually convincing, but the suggestions rather less so (nothing seems to have become of them).  One of the more interesting articles I read from the period was attempting to add some sanity and consistancy to how illusion magic was arbitrated, which, from the letters recieved was clearly all across the board.  The magazine as a whole resembles a dead tree edition of EnWorld, with DM's swapping advice, some good and some bad.About #75 I think things begin to pick up, and I can see some argument for #75ish through #90ish being a really classic run (for reasons outlined by jmucchiello), but I have a hard time seeing what people looking at the older period are nostalgic for.  Have you gone back and looked at those issues lately?I still would put the period from 180ish to 200ish up against anything Dragon ever did in terms of quality, with a pretty good run to about 25 issues to either side of that.  It was IMO the beginning of a pretty dismal period for the game, but its also a period were most of the best stuff being published for the game is in Dragon and Dungeon.</blockquote>

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