Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="13garth13" data-source="post: 1888509" data-attributes="member: 16979">First off, I have been reading Dragon since my grandmother bought me the issue with the first part of the Nine Hells article (somewhere in the early #70s...can't recall offhand).  Secondly, it might be worth mentioning that I am a DM and my biases for articles will follow accordingly.    Allow me to echo some of the respondents to your query with the reply that Dragon just seems to have lost flavour and imagination...in many ways there is just something ineffable that has vanished over the last few months (much more noticeably {sp?} since the format change, but my sense of dissatisfaction had been growing for a few months prior).  As such I allowed my subscription to lapse and will now see on a case-by-case basis from here on in.  I love monster articles, although I must go against what seems to be the popular grain and note that I have never found "Ecology" articles terribly useful to me (even back in the day...although both the Ecology of the Mind Flayer and the Ecology of the Doppleganger were total classics!)  Unless there's something like adventure hooks or some interesting ideas on species variations, etc., then there's just nothing that will honestly be quite useful for the few rounds that the creature will be "on screen".    I don't mind magic item articles as long as they are interesting and useful in an average campaign.  I LOVE the idea of a Creature Catalogue!!  That would certainly get my interest piqued, because monsters are something that I can actually USE in my game.  Perhaps that is the key...I just haven't found much that was useful in recent issues...  Articles about locations (complete with maps) whether on the Prime or the planes would be useful, as would be new monsters and magic items.  Give me things that spark the imagination, rather than dull it with pedestrian writing and dull, ordinary topics.  I used to read Dragon to be inspired...and that hasn't happened in awhile...  I don't mind the computer game articles if they actually converted monsters rather than a seemingly endless supply of spells and feats.... .... Allow me to reiterate what many are saying; there is not really much need (IMO of course) for new feats and spells.  The core manuals have a great deal of them (although I will also reveal my campaign world bias and state that I looooved the Greyhawk regional feats; thanks for those, Erik) and of course there are more spells than you can shake a stick at, most of which are simple variations on a theme.  Perhaps within the parentheses of my last comment lies the key; feats and such are much more useful when they are immediately applicable and particularly if they are aimed at a particular campaign niche.  I think that the move towards the generic in an attempt to make articles more palatable to homebrewers has crippled the degree of flavour that should be present.  I would relish a return to articles devoted to particular campaign worlds (especially more Greyhawk...although everyone else should have their day too of course  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />   The things I don't find useful in the slightest are the Class Acts (boring, flavourless, and for the most part containing information that most of your readership could come up with on their own) and fiction (don't mind it, but never read it or use it so it does tend to amount to wasted space).  In addition, the seemingly endless stream of prestige classes leaves me cold (does there really have to be some every issue?!)   In terms of ways to improve and to summarize, I will just say that more Greyhawk (in case I haven't mentioned it previously<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  would be wonderful, as would more articles such as locations and monsters that are both flavourful and immediately usefull.  Cheers,  Colin</blockquote>

Verification