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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AlecAustin" data-source="post: 1888351" data-attributes="member: 25231">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.</blockquote>

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