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Message: <blockquote data-quote="duclair" data-source="post: 1887906" data-attributes="member: 26058">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.</blockquote>

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