No time to play's page

Here's my two cents worth on skills.

Drop the intelligence modifier to the initial number of skills and add one or two extra skills to wizard. Your ability, or lack thereof, to ride, climb, swim, balance etc. shouldn't be indirectly derived from your intelligence.

Consolidate Disable Device and Escape Artist with Theft.

Consolidate Climb and Swim into Athletics or some such skill.

Consolidate Knowledge (history, local, nobility, and religion) into Knowledge (social).

Consolidate Knowledge (arcana, parts of dungeoneering, and planes) into Knowledge (supernatural).

Consolidate Knowledge (geography and nature) into Knowledge (nature).

Consolidate Knowledge (engineering and parts of dungeoneering) into Knowledge (artificer).

As I see it, consolidating the knowledge skill can only help the game, plus dark ages "knowledge" tended to cover much broader subjects than they do now. It also mitigates the loss of skills a typical wizard would suffer due to my first suggestion.

And as a final touch, drop "Knowledge" and instead call it "Lore" to give it a bit more of a fantasy feel.

I thought I selected the right option but I wasn't quite sure. I just wanted to check and see if I was a Charter Subscriber and that I was going to be getting the Player's Guide to Rise of the Runelords.

To Paizo: Bravo for carrying on the tradition of offering us a monthly periodical. A periodical I can look forward to receiving in the mail. A periodical with all the advantages that only the printed word has to offer.

To WotC: Boooooo. My feelings are reminiscent of the crone who booed Buttercup in The Princess Bride. Ending these icons of the RPG culture is almost unforgivable. Anything you could do on-line just won’t be the same It had better be good or you won’t be seeing any of my hard-earned cash. (And that’s the bottom line, isn’t it?). …Queens of refuse… I hope you see the error of your ways and this becomes merely a footnote in the history of Dungeon and Dragon.

I vaguely remember Dragon asking us to let them know if we came across references to D&D in pop culture (it may have been and editorial comment made a few years ago). The human character in the daily comic strip "Get Fuzzy" by Darby Conley appears to play D&D. A couple times a month he'll make a reference to D&D. This week it was how hard it was to trip a Bugbear and two weeks ago he got his D&D characters guild t-shirt in the mail.

That pretty much explains it. I still try to keep up with the hobby in anticipation of that fateful day when I will have time to play...

I've finally read through issue 329 and I'm impressed. It's got an excellent piece of cover art. The crunch-to-fluff ratio is perfect. It isn't geared towards any particular setting. It's got a dragon in it (every Dragon should have dragons somewhere in the issue). Did I mention the excellent cover art?

If this is the new look and direction of Dragon, Thank you.

Now if we could just replace some of the interior art with black and white illustrations, get rid of the blurbs on the cover, bring back Wormy...

Please bring the tokens back, they were the best thing since sliced bread. I'd love to see furniture, doors, treasure piles etc.

By the way, does anybody know where i can find something about Skullport (maps, descriptions, places, people).

Dragon issue 172 had a map and a few pages of text if I remember correctly.

I loved FR in its infancy in Dragon and when the boxed set first came out. Then I HATED it when D&D was nothing but FR, and I was disappointed and frustrated with the quality and sheer volume of FR material that appeared in Dungeon and Dragon. Now that Ebberon is out and Greyhawk is chugging along FR seems to be taking a more reasonable role and I’m starting to like it again.

So to answer Eric's question, yes I’d like to see a FR campaign arc as long as it’s the same high quality material that’s been appearing in Dungeon lately. On the other hand, an entire adventure path might be a little much. I really want to like the FR; I just don’t want it shoved down my throat again.

Let me clarify a bit…

I know the Monster Manual lists all kinds of ways to improve monsters and adjust their CR accordingly, but it’s sadly lacking when it comes to toning down a monster or taking away a NPC’s equipment. There's no law saying every 9th level character will have 15,000gp of equipment and every monster will be average or better. This is where the Dungeon, as the DM’s resource, could pick up the slack.

I'm looking for an article with guidelines or a mechanic for making a monster or NPC weaker: Take away all of the 15th level fighter’s equipment and give him a sharp stick and a loin cloth. What's that fighter's CR now? What about the littlest giant, who’s no bigger than a house, and only has 8 hit die instead of 12, what’s his CR? What if the red dragon doesn’t cast spells (like 60% of his first edition predecessors), what does his CR drop to?

I'd like to see the Dungeon and Dragon board links near the top of the Paizo / Messageboards page. They're the ones with the most activity, and I'd like to be able to click on the link without having to scroll down every time.

ASEO,
It was in a sidebar in the latest Dungeon on one of the Prison Mail pages.

Sense Dungeon is the DM's resource here's something I'd like to see...

I want a mechanic for modifying a monster’s CR for more or less equipment than it’s CR or class level would dictate. The Monster Manual gives good guidelines for improving monsters, but says nothing about making them weaker or modifying the equipment they normally use. Giving us something like that would make high level adventures easier to write (at least for me it would).

The hardest thing for me to swallow with high level adventures like Throne of Iuz is the ammount of magical equipment the cannon fodder needs to balance things out. Really, who has the money and XP to outfit an army with magical equipment. Not only that but outfitting all the NPCs and monsters like adventurers floods the PCs with minor magic items they’ll probably just sell. As a DM I’d rather give the PCs a few big items they’d want to keep. I know there are all kinds of ways around this problem, and some PC might find a use for a couple hundred +1 weapons, but like I said, I’d like to see a mechanic for it.

You might want to find out what they want first. Suprises are ok, but they usually end up backfiring on me as often as not.I imagine you want your players to be just as excited about their reward as you are, I would.

There are more than double the posts on the Dungeon general board than on the Dragon general board. I thought Dragon was the more popular magazine. (I prefer Dungeon myself...)

Which one has the higher circulation?

I'd love a copy if it's not too much trouble.

Thanks,

jjrerodda@earthlink.net

I agree completely.

Along those lines; why don’t they use the sample NPCs from the DMG? I don’t have my book in front of me but I seem to remember 5-10 pages devoted to sample NPCs.

It's good to hear he's not dead or worse... I'll be looking forward to seeing his work agian.

Thanks

What ever happened to the comic strip Wormy and Dave Trampier? I was looking through my Dragon Archive and Wormy just seems to stop in the middle of the story line. Is there any chance Dave could come back to finish the strip or just do an illustration here and there? He’s my favorite artist from any edition.

My God, they were beautful. Yes, beautiful. There's just no other word for it. Sweeping, uncluttered, panoramic vistas of fantasy worlds that, to this day, make me want to get out there and play like nothing else. They've fired my imagination for years.

The covers since 3E are just terrible. So stale. So trite. So...souless. Just figures in poses. No insight. No feeling. No WORLDS.

The constant theme of one or two NPCs in a “cool” pose on Dragon covers over the last three years has become tiresome... Oh, so tiresome. Don’t get me wrong, the artists are great, they turn out quality stuff, even the cartoonish stuff is good in it’s own way. The problem is I’ve grown weary of seeing the same pose over and over again, and I’m tired of being attacked by the subject of the cover art.

The recent covers do nothing to fuel my imagination anymore. I used to build whole adventures and entire campaigns off of one piece of cover art. Now I’m lucky if they give me a good idea for a character or NPC. Issues 326 and 327 were a welcome departure from the current theme, but covers like that are too few and far in-between.

Dragon, please bring the fantasy landscapes, complex backdrops, and hair-raising encounters back to your covers. A little variety isn’t too much to ask for, is it?