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="kigmatzomat" data-source="post: 1888547" data-attributes="member: 9254">I think I'm like most gamers in that I read Dragon for a year or two after a new edition and then taper off.  I haven't picked up an issue of Dragon in months.  Why?  In the early days we want to hear what other people have come up with and can expand our understanding of the game's strengths and weaknesses faster than by gaming.  But now it's been several years since a new edition's come out (3.5 is a revision, not a new edition) and we understand what it is.  We've got all the mechanics we need and anything more tends to contradict canon. So the real question is: What does Dragon do for gamers in a mature edition?  You can't generate rules; I have a shelf full of WotC materials and could easily fill bookcases with 3rd party materials.  I'll never use it all.  You have to go for flavor and industry.I haven't picked up a Dragon since the redesign so I might be speaking to the choir on these:*Serious, critical reviews of OGL/d20 products and not just WotC stuff.  Not everyone has access to ENWorld.  You want to do an issue on Dwarves?  Include reviews and comparisons of Complete/Slayers Guide/etc on Dwarves.  Don't just hit the major publishers, go ahead and review PDFs or small market products.  And I want to know what sucks about the book.  How does the price hold up against the rest of the market?  What other books are out there that compete with it?  *Wide ranging setting support.  Take Ecology and show how common, OGL creatures would behave in different settings.  FR vs Eberron vs. oriental vs greek vs celtic.  Show me how goblins can be everything from sniveling toadies to an angry hoard that only attacks in thousand-goblin strong tribes.  How will goblins fight peasants & samurai vs how they fight centurions in phalanxes or mounted cavalry?  *When focusing on a setting (cold, space, planar, etc) be sure to explain how it interacts with different levels.  A 2nd level party is terrified of snowstorms; most 15th level ones don't even blink.  Give ideas on what kind of rolls go with the terrain, how to make it acceptably complicated, what kinds of information the characters will have, and how the native widlife uses the environment.  *Try to minimize product-line specific theme issues and if you have them, explain how this or that would work in a different kind of campaign or if it is appropriate.  *Don't make a Dragon-exclusive the theme of an issue; they rarely fit in most people's game.  I seem to recall a couple of novel-specific issues of Dragon that had no support outside of Dragon (Shanarra?).  But just because I don't want an entire issue focused on one setting doesn't mean I don't want anything new; I just don't want the new thing to dominate the issue.  You want to do Shanarra, you make it tie into the rest of the issue's theme and possibly take more of the tack of how to convert the Shanarra books to D&D.  Ahhh, my spleen feels vented.</blockquote>

Verification