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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 1931892" data-attributes="member: 27012">One of the other things that the old issues of Dragon had were articles that detailed specific elements of the game by adding new rules and providing lists and tables.  While I don't think you should emulate the uneven and ad hoc nature of those "golden era" articles, I'm thinking about articles along the lines of either the city building web enhancement for the DMG (11 pages) or the sanity rules in Unearthed Arcana.I'm not sure that the problem is so much "crunch" vs. "fluff" but the sorts of crunch that are being offered.  I think that a certain amount of applied crunch can have a place.  For example (and Dragon may have already covered some of these issues during the years when I wasn't buying it so take these as examples), crunchy or semi-crunchy articles on movement and combat in zero-G, infected wounds, a more detailed treatment of poison and poisoning, a detailed treatment of tracking, rules for handling barter economies, random tables for deciding what a building is and what's in it, etc.  All of those things could get fairly crunchy but also provide inspiration.Personally, I have more use for long reviews than short reviews.  It's easy enough to find a short review or some opinions about a book on the web.  What I want are longer and more detailed reviews.This is yet another good way to write articles that add things, and it should be fairly drop-in.  Great!Also good.  Articles that detail places, including cities, villages, or even individual buildings are good, especially if they have elements that are generic enough to be adaptable to any setting.  Articles detailing natural places, a desert, woods, a swamp, etc. with a broader ecosystem and things like detailed encounter tables could also be helpful.  "If I wanted into the Orange Woods, what will I run into?"  If you keep the regions fairly small, or at least self-contained, they could have a lot of drop-in utility for me as a GM.Concerning maps, I purchased the 300th issue of White Dwarf pretty much simply for the map that was included.  Good maps (and I don't think the Eberron map that was recently included was good--see that White Dwarf map) can sell a magazine.I think that's good, but as a GM or player, I'm more interested in rules for detailing those elements of the game than prestige classes or more feats (e.g., lists of DCs and details that can affect skill use that either a player or GM can use).  Tell me how to detail a swashbuckling fight or espionage mission with the existing rules and classes rather than adding new prestige classes and feats.  Overall, I think you are on the right track thinking about providing inspiration.The only pure fiction that I've ever found really enjoyable in Dragon was the story about an online role-playing game that appeared years ago that did a pretty good job of anticipating, in the early 1980s I think, the online games that would appear years later.Articles on dealing with the social aspect of role-playing, play styles, finding time to role-play, and resolving particular sorts of in-game problems and conflicts could also be useful.  Judging by the online discussions that I see, this is a major problem that saps a lot of enjoyment out of the hobby and drives people away.  A final bit of advice that I'll give is to find some copies of Different Worlds, The Space Gamer, Arcane, Interactive Fantasy, and other gaming magazines during their golden eras and see if there was anything they were doing that Dragon should have been doing and could do.  You can always learn something from the competition.</blockquote>

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