Why _DON'T_ You Buy Dragon Magazine?

[HalWhitewyrm]

There are two big reasons why I don't buy Dragon anymore (and pretty much haven't in the last two years, with a few exceptions, like the issue with articles for all the out-of-print campaigns):

1- WotC-only showcase: Since the release of 3e and the OGL, I would have thought that Dragon would emerge as a general RPG mag, with a preference for WotC material. But the magazine is all WotC stuff, without nods to the other good campaigns out there by 3rd party publishers. If I wanted to know more about FR, Eberron, Dragonlance, etc. I can just go and buy the respective books, just create it myself or go online and do a search to see what others have done. This WotC-only policy leads me to #2.

2- No OGC: All the material in Dragon is closed content, which means that if it's not for home use, then I can't touch it. As a freelancer, I prefer to stay away from closed content material so as to avoid any influence when I am writing my own products. The biggest thing about 3e for me was the OGL and the spirit of cooperation and openness it brought, and Dragon remaining closed content only goes against that spirit. That's why I loved Campaign magazine, crude as it was; I was sad to see it go.

I like the bew feature of having a one-page article with something for each core class, but due to #2 above I never do more than skim through the mag, read the titles and put it back on the rack.

What would get me buying again? Dragon opening up and becoming a OGC magazine, not just a WotC brochure. I realize I am probably in the minority, but I would like to see Dragon stop being just about official D&D and become THE D&D/d20 magazine for the industry.

Daniel M. Perez
halwhitewyrm@yahoo.com

 

[alsih2o]

1. Why don't you buy the magazine?

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

1. I am never anywhere where it is offered. It isn't at my grocery store and I have been in a game shop maybe twice in two years.

2. Get it out of the bookstores and game shops and into my PC. Make it all available online and I will subscribe and peruse. Perhaps a subscription service that lets me see this months and flip through some archives? I would pay through the nose for that.

 

[jodyjohnson]

One time subscriber to Dragon. Current subscriber to Dungeon.

DM and sometime player, only magazine subscriber in my circle.

1. Dragon is available at the library. (Dungeon isn't and has more ownership value.)

2. Getting burned out on crunch. The WotC production schedule and 3rd party material is more than sufficient to meet my need for crunch. Too much crunch in Dragon.

3. All the good crunch ends up in the books anyway. Seems like it's tossed out there for playtesting but then very few games allow Dragon crunch in to actually test before it hits the WotC book.

4. Sage Advice was major motivator for purchase but hits the FAQ reasonably soon. A big chunk of the role of Sage Advice for us has been met by EN World Rules forum and to a lesser degree the Wizard boards.

5. Too many short articles and lack of depth.

6. Too many campaign specific articles that are primarily crunch (prc, regional feats, spells tied to NPCs or deities).

7. Magazine content is harder to pull cruch out of than web based content. Magazines are less accessible to the DnD group as a whole. At least the books stay in print longer if we suddenly find the urge to go on a targent.

----Some things that make me pick up an issue.
1. A solid insert: maps, battle maps, cardstock tiles, useful tokens

2. Historical articles that are applied to gaming fluff. Especially with photos, maps, and diagrams. Real world castles, dungeons, temples, buildings, exotic terrain, medieval gear.

3. When the theme happens to match my focus or current interest.

----Articles which I enjoy reading
1. New edition teasers for upcoming changes (lead up to 3.0 especially). Articles that help me plan for what's coming 6+ months down the road so our group can transition. They need to contain enough crunch to start incorporating the upcoming changes. (Although 4.0 might end our upgrading if it comes too soon.)

2. New or old creatures given the Ecology treatment but heavy on the fluff. Especially when the fluff involves narrative with character, mood, and setting. A 3 page article with raw stat blocks doesn't do much for me.

3. A new or old prestige class (or feat) appended to fictional narrative emphasizing the class's (or feat's) flavor and how it ties into the specific setting (maybe with a sidebar on other settings). Include NPC stat blocks and descriptions.

4. Giants of the Earth - updated for 3.5, heavy on the historical fluff. Triple statted for low magic/historical, standard campaign, and epic.

5. Alternative (non-canonical) stats for campaign specific NPCs heavy on the fluff. New NPCs with campaign specific fluff. Targetted at alternate epic or low magic settings. (e.g. an Epic Lord of the Blades, or a low level Robilar or Mordenkainen).

6. Character maximizing articles disguised in narrative. The optimizations can be subscripted.


Primarily articles that are interesting to read and generate character or campaign ideas even if I don't use the crunch.

 

[Album Cover X]

I agree with many of the common ideas here on how Dragon can be improved...

But my reason for not buying Dragon is simple:

Bad customer service experience. Its something a company literally cannot afford to have happen. I was a subscriber of 3 years or so and then I moved cross-country at about the same time my subscripition was ending. I renewed it, sent in my new info/address. And nothing. You guys have my money but I don't have any issues to show for it.

I did contact customer service... exchanged a few emails... people were "looking into the matter" and then nothing. And all this is now well over a year ago so it comes to a point where its not worth; I have plenty of other stuff to worry about.

I enjoyed getting the mag and was more than willing to renew. But its hard to get excited about it now after my experience. And since you asked the question, I thought relaying my experience here is justified.

 

[Gez]

Because it's too expensive. Because it's only in hobby stores (and then again, not always), not in the local newspaper shop. (See location.)

Still, I bought one. #285.

 

[McBard]

Dungeon and Dragon magazines must find niches not already well-filled by two other prolific sources: 1) WoTC's monthly product releases and 2) the Internet (e.g. EN World, message boards, fan sites).

The new Dungeon clearly has found its well-defined niche: high-quality (certainly in production value, mostly in content) adventures. Regarding the above two other sources of D&D material, WoTC no longer really provides published adventure modules (certainly not three every month like Dungeon) and the Internet (fan-generated adventure material) comes nowhere close in quality. Kudos to Dungeon and keep 'em coming!

As far as Dragon goes, contrastingly, both sources outshine it: WoTC's releases cover the crunch (MM II, Frostburn, Races of fill-in-the-blank, et al); and the Internet (message boards) cover the hashing out of rules. The Internet obviously produces a lot of crunch--and some of it is often of good quality (e.g. the Sorcerer fixes).

What does that leave for Dragonto fill? I'm not sure. But not fantasy fiction (that niche is much better provided for by...well, fantasy fiction book and comic publishing).

Perhaps Dragon should throw itself into the actual worlds of D&D: geography, flora, flauna, history, people of Eberron, Faerun, Oerth, and all the rest.

 

[Wraith Form]

What I do want to see in Dragon:

Writers who actually recognize that there is a popular 3rd party market out there. The only reference to 3rd party products are in the advertisements that they buy. It's like buying USA Today and seeing no mention of the Middle East. I think the best "issue" you guys did was the special d20 issue where you actually reviewed AEG's modules, and talked candidly about the license and other publishers. That was great! More reviews of 3rd party products, more discussions of 3rd party products. Use 3rd party OGC - that's what it's there for.

Echoed on here a lot already - more plot hooks, campaign ideas, world-building rules, etc. DM's read Dragon more than players do, I suspect.

Lastly, - invite feedback! I let my subscription expire several months ago. Before that, the only "articles" I ever read were Gygax's column, the letters to the editor, and maybe the occasional article by Monte or Skip if I saw something that caught my eye. That was pretty much it. On feedback, I'd like to see a regular column where readers can contribute. The thing I love about ENworld is that I can ask people about their campaign settings, their interesting games, or neat ideas that they've used. I love this place for the ideas. I don't get that from Dragon. Feature a special segment where people can send in their failed Campaign setting submission. I suspect many of them are really, really cool, even though they didn't win. Eberron isn't everyone's cup of joe. Most people I know don't follow the "corporate line" when it comes to their campaign setting. Even people who run FR or Eberron are probably using at least 1 or 2 3rd party products, or homebrew modifications. The game I'm currently playing in is set in Harn, using the d20 rules, for example.

Damn. Yeah, that too, what he said. (points to Die Kluge)

Well spoken. Err, typed.

Please, no more Minitures junk. I didn't buy the game and I'm not going to. It's wasted paper in a magazine that is already of limited use to me.

Let me also echo the request for Dragon CD-ROMs of the issues from where the previous CD-ROM set left off. (Dungeon really, really needs the CD-ROM treatment, too, by the way!)

 

[Wombat]

Well, I used to subscribe (got myself a 3 year subscription after I was given the 3e books), but overall I found myself reading the comics and little else.

What problems did I have?

Well, there was very little of interest for me.

I do not play any of the core campaigns, so any articles related to that had no interest for me. I tend to run lower level campaigns and many of the additions felt more appropriate for higher levels. Most of the monsters felt incredibly inappropriate for my campaigns and of little general interest for the types of games I fun. I loath planar adventuring and found far too much material on that for my tastes. The fiction ran from mediocre to bad. And the pushing of Chainmail and other points of increased miniature-izing of D&D was anathema to my needs or desires.

I liked the cartoons at least...

 

[fredramsey]

Actually, if WOTC wants to come out with THE killer magazine, they should just do one called d20 Fantasy (excuse me if there is one already).

All d20 Fantasy publishers would be invited to advertise, and provide material. Now, granted, the odds are better for Bastion Press or Necromancer or someone to get in rather than a small PDF shop, but if the magazine covered all the stuff being released, gamers would snap that bad boy up!

I think this could work. Hell, I'd buy it!

 

[duclair]

I've never subscribed to Dragon, mostly because the price difference for Canadian subscriptions has always been high enough that it made more sense for me to just buy it off the rack. Lately, though, I confess that I've been buying less issues that way, and I think there are two factors behind this.

First, I worry that Dragon is leaning a little too much towards being a WotC product-delivery shill. Yes, I know that Wizards pays advertising dollar for their supplements, but look at the editorial in any recent issue. 'Previews, Notes, Etc.' is 80% WotC content that I can get in any number of other places (primarily ENWorld). 'Under Command' seems a thinly disguised photo-press release for whatever new D&D Miniatures expansion pack is being unleashed on the world. 'Coup de Grace' is insider stuff that's interesting but would have worked just as well as an article on the Wizards web site. 'Sage Advice' is (still) three pages wasted on information that I'll get in the next FAQ update anyway. And features seem more and more content-slanted towards whatever new product WotC is selling (read: Eberron) at the expense of existing product that more people are probably actually playing (read: Greyhawk and the Realms).

Personally, I like Eberron, but here's a rhetorical question — if the setting had tanked completely (slagged by the reviewers, ignored by the players, MIA in the marketplace), would Dragon have had the free ability to choose to ignore it? Or on some level, does the question of what setting-support material goes into the mag depend less on the sense of who's going to want to read it than it does on royal assent from Renton?

(Having said that, the recent redesign seems to lend itself towards more setting-neutral material, but that ties to the following point.)

Second, for the past several years (long before Mr. Mona's tenure), the editorial philosophy of Dragon seems to have become built around the idea of the magazine being all things for all people. And while this is great in a warm-and-fuzzy egalitarian sense, it's important to remember that a common denominator always becomes a lowest common denominator in the end. Do a poll on these boards asking members to list the beverages they drink most regularly, and water will likely be the only response they all share. (Mountain Dew doesn't make the cut in Canada; no caffeine up here.) Likewise, when articles are reworked to make them as generic as possible, they inevitably get less interesting, I think. Consider the Dark Sun controversy from earlier this year, where the idea seems to have been to willingly sacrifice flavor (the original context and philosophy of the setting) in favor of homogeneity (the idea that a player who really likes his paladin shouldn't be forced to think about what a world without paladins might look like).

A writer I know had a piece in Dragon last year that was also rewritten fairly extensively in order to make it more generic, and while he wasn't displeased with the result, his words to me at the time were 'D&D is a game built around imagination, but Dragon seems to want to assume that its audience has no imagination.'

If you look for homogenous, it's almost inevitable that you find tedious. The Dragon of the past few years seems to want to inspire every reader to be able to say 'Yeah, I can use that in my game.' When I first started reading it back in the 1980s, Dragon seemed to want to inspire every reader to be able to say 'Wow, I didn't know I could use that in my game.'

More 'Wow', less 'Yeah' is what I'd need to get me back on board.