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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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?

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.