Why _DON'T_ You Buy Dragon Magazine?

[Purple Dragon Knight]

No more Realms...

I don't buy Dragon anymore for two reasons:

1. poor handling of my subscription that led me to request my money back (I had not received any issues after 6 months of subscription); and

2. there is no more Forgotten Realms content within Dragon (this was the only reason why I still picked it up at the store after I cancelled my subscription).

Things to change so I buy Dragon again:

a. More FR stuff. Not only a two-page article from Greenwood, but short stories, PrCs, Feats that would be specific to the Realms.

b. Give a chance to new writers. It seems that now, Dragon is "closed for business" from a writer's standpoint... it used to be a vehicle for discovering new authors/game designers. Now it seems that unless you have friends in very high places, you stand no chance.

c. Gimmicks and toys. Don't be scared to shrink-wrap your babies and include maps, dice, toys, figs, spell templates, etc. Man! since its reformat, I haven't bought one issue... it's so dull now!

 

[ivocaliban]

I buy about 3 or 4 issues of Dragon magazine every year. The problem is, the nearest place that offers Dragon is about an hour from my house. Many times I've considered getting a subscription, but two things keep me from it:

1) I have post office box. A tiny, cramped post office box to be exact. The one time I ordered a subscription to a magazine every issue ended up trashed by the time I received it.

2) There's generally not enough of interest in each issue to warrant the cover price. Sure, every issue has something I'd like to have, but I won't buy a magazine for a single article unless it takes up some serious space. My favourite issue of Dragon (and one I've used more than most WotC books) is #294 (Deities, Relics, & Vehicles). I've used at least 75% of the material in that issue alone. While I like that Dragon has become more diverse, it's often so diverse that much of it is of little use to me.

As someone who runs a (heavily-modified) Greyhawk campaign, has no interest in Eberron and only a little interest in Forgotten Realms, both Dragon and Dungeon magazines have become less than ideal as of late. Still, I depend on them for filling in the Greyhawk gaps and offering more generalized D&D information.

And so, I still buy Dragon magazine, but I'm very selective regarding which issues I pick up. Since Paizo took command I would have to say the issue that most attracted my attention was #315 (Classic Campaigns). Since the recent shift in format I haven't bought any Dragon magazines, however. I look at them every month and often find one or two things I could use, but only one or two. I'll keep looking, however.

Oh, and as a final note, I'm a sucker for inserts. I snapped up the Dragon magazine with the DM's screen and I'll likely be picking up all four issues of Dungeon that contain the Greyhawk maps.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

No fluff, all crunch mostly. My AD&D game is over, my C&C game will start before the new year. Since I don't need feats or PRCs what good would dragon be to me? With such dry mechanical articles or stuff on game worlds I don't use, there is no inspiration to make me want to adapt 3.5 stuff to C&C. People have brought up the Ecology articles. Look at some of Greenwood's old articles. That is how you should write an ecology article.

Oh Mutants & Masterinds stuff would help.

 

[Breakdaddy]

1.) Instead of PrCs, have articles explaining how already published feats and classes can combine to form archetypes.

2.) Fluff, fluff, and more fluff: For instance, you could do a historical article on Roman Legionaires. Explain how the fighter class can be fitted to different fighter types. Combine fluff with the types of equipment and feats that a Roman would have and suddenly, you will have players that are effective with some personality. You will get more GMs to allow Dragon in game if it shows EXISTING rules and how to work them rather than new, unplaytested, unbalanced rules.

3.) Monsters! Instead of new monsters, have an article about how a monster fights! Give a 5 round set of monster tactics. Yes, it would be geared towards GMs, but players would enjoy it too. That would be VERY useful.

4.) Tactical Studies: Have an article about player tactics. Show them how to use existing rules and crunch in game. Explain how and when to use a fireball. Explain what spells, skills, feats would be useful in certain situations.

5.) Fluffer-size the rules: Have an article that explains the fluff of a skill, spell, feat or class. Give players a sense of how to describe the use of their abilities. Instead of someone saying "I use sleight of hand," have a short skit meant to show a player how to describe sleight of hand in game. "I trip and fall into the wealthy noble, moving lightly to the gold-filled purse by her side."

6.) TEACH! Dragon should be a teaching tool. It should be aimed at teaching players not just the crunch of the game, but the soul of the game. Right now, Dragon has no soul and that is in desperate need. There needs to be something other than crunch that makes people want to read Dragon.

AMEN! Every suggestion you made was 100 percent spot-on afaiac. Add my voice also to those who would see fiction removed from dragon and follow the above advice and I would subscribe right now! As an aside, I am a current subscriber of Dungeon, and it rules with a firm yet benevolent hand. Thanks for listening, Erik!

 

[Andre]

b. Give a chance to new writers. It seems that now, Dragon is "closed for business" from a writer's standpoint... it used to be a vehicle for discovering new authors/game designers. Now it seems that unless you have friends in very high places, you stand no chance.

I see things a bit differently.

I agree that the quality of writing seems to have declined, but I don't blame Dragon or Paizo for this. I've seen first-hand and on these boards that a lot of very intelligent, creative, capable authors are chosing to self-publish (mainly pdf's) rather than submit articles to Dragon. I don't know what Paizo can do about this, but it seems clear to me that there is a lot more competition for good material than there was 10 or 20 years ago.

 

[Amaroq]

Fill in the blank:
Dungeon is a repository of modules.
Dragon is a repository of ________.

Great point: As a reader, I don't feel a 'mission statement' from Dragon: the content is fairly widely scattered, trying to appeal to too many people, and thus not appealing to any specific individual as much.

If I were to answer the question, I'd say
'Dragon is a repository of unbalanced feats, spells, and prestige classes'.

Which is particularly sad when I hear people saying

I don't need more feats, spells, and especially prestige classes.

I definitely agree!

I was (like many of your responders) a Dragon subscriber back in the two-digit era, and I let my subscription run out because I felt it had gotten to the following crux:
Too many non-core variations which weren't game-balanced and didn't fit into my campaign setting.

Frankly, this is my biggest problem with the glut of d20 source material which the OGL has engendered: there is so much out there that I have a very difficult time determining what's 'level' between different systems, and especially at the crucial 'Before time of purchase' moment.

The biggest challenge I face as a DM is determining what rules to 'allow' and what rules to 'disallow' in my campaign setting.

What do I really want?

1. Reviews of other OGL content, specifically with an eye to a 'quick description' of what new systems they might have added, and then a detailed discussion of how balanced or unbalanced that is relative to some baseline (core?)

2. 'Behind the Curtain' articles, perhaps interviews with publishers and producers, describing how they decided on the mechanics they chose, what alternate mechanics they discarded, and why.

3. 'Power Evaluator' articles, describing ways of evaluating the balance of entirely new material, e.g., something which I could apply both to anything which my creativity can devise, or to a third-party supplement which I am considering. Specifically, I want to hear:
a.) How to judge the relative power of different feats
b.) How to find the appropriate level for a spell
c.) How to evaluate the relative power of a class or prestige class
d.) How to evaluate the relative power of a magic item
e.) Which creature CR's are broken and why; a better system for deciding on a CR for your home-brew monster
f.) Some non-lethal counters for over-optimized characters
g.) How to judge experience awards for non-combat game sessions.

4. House rules and how to judge/evaluate them

5. Random DM'img aids, such as Creature Collection-style counters, etc.

What I've been hoping for for a while are things like Dr_Spunge's 'character point' system, things which 'open the hood' of this rules system we play by, and let us get our hands greasy tinkering with the engine.

But somehow, I think that's a different magazine. Or even a core rulebook.

 

[philreed]

3. Take a look at some of the smaller pdf's selling at RPGNow, especially Phil Reed's. I purchased a couple and loved them. Why? Because the ideas were so interesting. Crunch is limited to the minimum necessary, but the articles are steeped in flavor. Rather than give us a list of magic items with mechanical descriptions, try to emulate these.

Thanks! Can I ask which ones you purchased?

 

[Marius Delphus]

I've decided to let my subscription lapse, after some soul-searching (I was a regular buyer for a long time before I was a subscriber -- my collection is fairly complete back to issue 80), for one fairly simple reason: I'm sick to death of new classes, new races, new feats, and new spells. And I don't play much at the moment. Two reasons. And the first few issues of the re-format went too far in the "crunch" direction for me and turned me right off. Three reasons. And I have no interest whatsoever in Eberron or the miniatures game. Four reasons. I'll come in again.

Seriously, though, I don't have an axe to grind over it. Dragon needs to focus on where the customers are, and I respect that without qualification. I even believe the re-format was a very good move for the magazine (though I'm not, of course, privy to sales figures). It's just that I've known for a while that I'm not part of Dragon's core audience* at the moment, and so for me, personally, it's not worth renewing. For now, I'll consider picking up an individual issue or two per year if it looks really engaging.

Dungeon, on the other hand, is a must have for me right now. The DMing articles are great, and the adventures, even if I can't use them right away, are always top-notch.

* Players who participate in more than one game session a month, have more than an itty bitty amount of time to spend on the game outside game sessions, and who generate new characters frequently, it would seem; though I could be mistaken.

 

[philreed]

I see things a bit differently.

I agree that the quality of writing seems to have declined, but I don't blame Dragon or Paizo for this. I've seen first-hand and on these boards that a lot of very intelligent, creative, capable authors are chosing to self-publish (mainly pdf's) rather than submit articles to Dragon. I don't know what Paizo can do about this, but it seems clear to me that there is a lot more competition for good material than there was 10 or 20 years ago.

I only recently sent a query to Dragon. Hopefully they'll take me up on some of my article ideas. (And, if they don't, I'll go ahead and put them together as PDFs.)

 

[AlecAustin]

1. Why don't you buy the magazine?

2. What sort of changes would make you more likely to give it another look?

As many people have noted, Dragon lacks sufficient flavor and interesting writing/ideas in most of its articles for me to want to pick it up. Instead, it has eight tons of crunch, some of which is useful, but most of which I'll never use.

Let me pick apart issue 324 (one which I actually bought, btw) as an example. Ignoring the pro-D&D movie screed (ack), First Watch, Under Command, and Silicon Sorcery (none of which I'm impressed by), I genuinely liked:

* The HP Lovecraft article. Much more interesting than the Knight vs. Samurai one in the previous issue.

* The Quori article. Why I bought the issue (I'm running an Eberron game).

* The monsters in "Chilled to the Bone", though they were a bit too specific in application (Frostfell-type areas only) to be optimally useful.

* Coup de Grace. I like these a lot; as Merric Blackman noted, one of the best parts about the new edition and designer's websites are discussions of *why* certain design choices were made.

More or less everything else, I was either indifferent to (Exorcising Equipment, the Sworn Slayer, Ecology of the Grippli) or actively annoyed by. Some of the Class Acts were decent, but the rest were dragged down by being too short, focused on rules I would never allow (flaws), or just useless (feat and prestige class advice for a sorcerer?).

Based on your comments on the Dungeon Board, Dragon was never supposed to be just "the player's magazine", and so I propose the following changes:

1) More DM advice articles. Dungeon doesn't seem to have a place for these unless they're written by Monte Cook, and It'd be nice to have a forum for discussions of running large parties, gauging challenge levels (ELs & CRs), and suchlike.

2) More flavor and personality in the writing. Not every article will be useful to everyone, so there's no excuse for completely leeching a writer's individual voice out of his work in the editing process.

3) More monsters. (I believe you have this one in hand already.) More specifically, though, I'd like to see advanced versions of monsters, too, possibly with suggested encounters or minimaps. This is spilling over into Dungeon territory, but Dungeon is rather popular because of this kind of thing...

4) More capsystem rules options. Obviously these aren't going to be complete capsystems, like the Epic or Psionics rules, but mini-subsystems that can be integrated into a game without much work would be much cooler and more flexible than a handful of feats or a new prestige class. OTOH, they'd probably need some testing before publication.

5) More "behind the curtain" material, to help players and DMs get a sense for how the rules work with each other, why certain design choices were made, and what effects certain kinds of house rules or customizations would have on the game.

Obviously, a lot of these would be quite a bit of work, while others might shift the magazine's focus a bit. But if Dragon is meant to be the magazine for D&D enthusiasts, shouldn't it provide some meat for those enthusiasts to chew on? After a certain point, loose collections of new feats and spells and prestige classes become even more insubstantial than the 'fluff' they're supposedly supplanting.