None, usually. These days, I'm listening to a few newly-penned Goblin Songs.
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For some reason, when I read the goblin songs, the circus-y theme from Comedy Central's "Insomniac" is what plays in my head. Anyone else? Just me?
Let us not forget the Goblin Gamers Song: Goblins eat your house and home,
Goblins curse your stupid dice.
Goblins steal the nacho chips,
Goblins swarm and goblins kick,
Goblins watch with beady eyes,
Goblins burp and goblins stink,
Goblins like your treats and snacks,
I've met some of "you guys," and that is, in fact, Them. Not sure who it was that utters the prophetic "What if we make him laugh and he shoots it through his nose?" at 18 seconds in, but that man deserves a cookie and some muffins. Though preferably not a mixture of "Oatmeal Raisin Cookie" and "Blueberry Corn Muffin" sodas. Ugh.
Very briefly: #351- Lost Regalia of the North: The Toppled Thrones by Eric L. Boyd
#352- The Forgotten Dead by Brian Cortijo
#353- Outsiders of the Realms by Thomas M. Costa
#354- Cormanthor: War Amidst the Trees by Eric L. Boyd
#355- Demon Cults of the Realms by Eric L. Boyd
#356- Dun dun dunnnnnnn. <dramatic suspense music>
I haven't received my copy of 352 yet, but from what I can tell, the relevant text was indeed omitted in editing. The original text from the submitted manuscript is as follows: Energy drain (Su): Living creatures hit by a skuz’s slam attack gain one negative level. The DC is 19 for the Fortitude save to remove a negative level. The save DC is Charisma-based. Pretty standard stuff, I'd say. Let me know how many characters survive. ;)
The DMG states that mithral wieghs half as much as steel and that it costs 500gp a pound. So since it weighs half aas much as steel than a pound of mithral should be equal to 2 pounds of steel. Therefore a Greatsword (8lbs) would require 4 pounds of mithral and cost 2000gp. Just wondering what other DMs think about this. The 500 gp/lb doesnt state whether the cost is per pound of material (in this case, 4lb) or per pound of the original item (8lb). I should point out, however, that platinum is valued 500 gp/lb (PH, 112), and mithral should probably be considered rarer and more precious than platinum--at least, in my opinion. I therefore price non-armor mithral items according to the pre-adjustment weight. [Regarding the masterwork property of items crafted of mithral, the DMG is explicit on this: "the masterwork cost is included in the prices given below." Unlike normal items, special material costs are paid in full, while items made using the Craft skill normally take only one-third the price in raw materials.] Pricing according to the mithral weight would mean that a mithral dagger, to use the extreme example, would cost 252 gp: 250 for the half pound of mithral and 2 gp for the usual dagger price. By contrast, a normal (steel) masterwork dagger costs 302 gp, more than the mithral version. [Note that the dart is worse, at 125gp 5sp for mithral, 300gp 5 sp for masterwork, but it's a corner-case where even the less-advantageous rule doesn't work. Besides, who uses darts?] Then again, the rules don't jibe with themselves. If priced by weight, a chain shirt would add 6,250gp priced by its post-reduction weight alone; full plate would add 12,500gp. So, it's all a mess. Do what you feel works best, be consistent with your ruling, and everything will work out fine.
The whole point of Class Acts is to find a way to keep the core material from being boring and to illustrate new ways of looking at "old" material. Every gaming group that plays D&D can get something out of the Class Acts series, because well over 90% of all characters (and 100% of characters using just the PH) are going to be members of at least one of these classes. That said, I personally don't see anything wrong with one-off Class Acts style coverage of psionic classes. I believe, however, that Dragon's current stance of "cover the core and only the core" places the psionic rules in poor stead to receive frequent coverage in the magazine.
Only about one out of every four (really rough estimate) Sage Advice questions or answers makes it into the FAQ. As DM, I tend to use about 90% of the Sage Advice in my game, so the FAQ omits about 75% of what I would find useful. Not so. At least, not anymore. At one point, there was enough lead time between Sage Advice responses and FAQ updates that certain questions didn't make it into the FAQ. The reason for this was simple: some answers were incorrect or misleading, and were omitted because of it. Now, every question and answer makes it into the FAQ. I took a random sampling of four Dragon issues released since 3.5- 313, 316, 322 and 323--and all of these issues have all their Sage Advice responses logged in the FAQ. It's only reasonable to assume that this will continue. While we certainly can't expect every question that Andy answers to make it into Dragon, we can expect every answer that appears in the magazine to make the FAQ, unless it's discovered that the response is somehow wrong.
The collected Sage Advice responses are already available online in PDF format. They are collectively known as the D&D FAQ, and can be found at http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/er/20030221a Turnover between the magazine and the website update is reasonably quick, with just a few weeks passing between the street date and the update of the FAQ file. Keep in mind that the current Sage, Andy Collins, is also a full-time developer for Wizards of the Coast, and has quite a few demands on his time. He already answers 2 pages worth of questions a month in addition to his workload of D&D books, and I somewhat doubt he has the time available to answer many more questions than what he already covers. |