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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 1887510" data-attributes="member: 19857">I feel the need to speak up here, even though I'm not quite sure that I'm in the target group that Erik was asking for.  I've been a subscriber to both Dungeon and Dragon on and off since the mid-80s.  I've seen the ups and the downs, and I currently subscribe to both.However, that's mainly because I renewed my subscriptions right before the big change occurred that split the DM stuff to Dungeon and the Player stuff to Dragon.  If I were renewing now, I'd definitely renew Dungeon - one of the best values per dollar in the D&D/d20 marketplace.  But I'd REALLY have to think hard about re-upping my Dragon subscription.The problems are the things that I foresaw back when the change was announced.  For D&D I'm a DM (mainly).  I'm a player in a few other games, but for D&D I run the show.  I have so many 3e, 3.5e and d20 supplements now that "player cookies" do NOTHING for my game.  I haven't seen a cookie in Dungeon in years that has been helpful for my campaign setting.  New prestige classes, new feats, new spells - I can get these things from WotC's Complete XXX series, various independent d20 companies, or many other places.  Heck, in my campaign only two of my players are using anything other than "core rules" from the Player's Handbook.  One is using a prestige class from Masters of the Wild, and the other is using a prestige class that the two of us came up with and balanced together.None of my players are Dragon readers, because the only D&D that they play is my campaign and my game=my rules.  I have a good relationship with all of my players and if they want something for their character, we work together to get it for them (some of my best story ideas have come from player requests).  If there were games other than D&D in Dragon, some of them might read it, but since that seems to be SO unpopular with the most vocal of the letter-writers in Dragon, I doubt that will happen any time soon...For me, the most useful columns in Dragon are the ones that "cross-over" between players and DM advice, but that's because I'm a DM.  If these columns were in Dungeon, Dragon would have no use for me at all (except for the comics - I do love Nodwick and Dork Tower).  Recent columns that have kept me interested were the Labyrinth and Sewer ones (Knight vs. Samurai didn't do it for me).  The Winning Races features have also been good (I've loved the lupins since Castle Amber, so that article warmed my heart), with both the lupins and the half-elemental articles standing out. These are less "player cookies" in my mind and more of a cross-over between DMs and Players (i.e. I'm much more likely to use the information in these articles for my NPCs than I am the ones mentioned above).I also enjoy the one-page class articles that are in the back now - these are crunchy articles that actually get my thinking about my NPCs.  I think that it helps that these deal with "core" classes rather than trying to introduce something new - they're just giving me new ways of looking at core ideas and I like that.Oh, and to reiterate what's been said before - fiction.  Its a waste of paper in the magazine for the me.  If I want to read fiction, I'll grab a book or a fiction magazine.Finally, I think its been said by others above but I think it deserves repeating, the magazine is not as much "fun" as it was in the past.  I thought I was imagining it, but I broke out some of my old issues a few weeks back and realized that there was a lot more energy and a lot more general "fun" in those old issues.  At one point, Dragon was THE community for D&D.  I think since TSR ran the whole thing into the ground in the mid-90's, Dragon's status as the "community" for D&D has moved to the web.  Dragon is much more polished now, and much more professionally written than it was, but it seems to have lost some of the raw energy that it once had.  If you have the CDRom archive handy (or the actual issues), I'd point you to the issues of Dragon right around issue #100 to see what I mean.  I don't think this is a case of me being "curmudgeony" (maybe it is), but these issues STILL have articles with relevance and usefulness today - something that I'm not sure that last month's issue of Dragon will be able to say when the 5th edition of D&D hits the market.Thanks for listening Erik.  One thing about this - PLEASE DON'T CHANGE DUNGEON BACK!  I think the shift in Dungeon to become a "DM-magazine" rather than just an adventure magazine is one of the BEST things that's happened to it.  I look forward to it now every month in the way that I used to look forward to Dragon every month - and that's after years of thinking that Dungeon was mostly worthless to my campaigns.  I still miss the non-D&D Polyhedron stuff from the magazine, but I love the new Dungeon.Keep up the good work, and thanks.</blockquote>

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