Yamo's page

In TSR's D&D, demihumans had strict level limits, based largely on the notion that if they didn't, these long-lived creatures would quickly level-up so much that they'd rule the world, with humans as either an enslaved underclass or an entirely extinct "failed race." Level limits make this a non-issue. If a human can reach level 20+ during his lifetime before old age brings an end to the ability to adventure successfully, an elf that lives ten or more times as long should have no trouble making level 100+ during that time.

In WotC's D&D, there's no limit to the levels that demihuman characters can attain. So what had been done to circumvent the "superelf problem?"

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6977577659&rd=1& amp;sspagename=STRK%3AMEWA%3AIT&rd=1

Fourty of the best issues of all-time for just $0.65 each before shipping.

Sweeeeeeeeeeeet.

Looking through some of my favorite issues of Dragon from the 80s and 90s today, I was thinking about great Dragon authors that aren't as well-known as Gygax, Greenwood, Mohan, Moore, Ward, Cook, Grubb, Lakofka, etc.

One name quickly jumped right to the forefront: Arthur Collins. This gentleman wrote a ton of classic articles in TSR's Dragon. His speciality wasn't designing rules bits like new monsters and spells, but rather eloquent essays on honing GMing and world-building skills. Everything from "Reflections of a Real-Life Cleric" back in 1980 to "Inventing the Instant Adventure" and "What Not to Include" from circa 1992. His run was epic and his great articles too many to count. These articles have been a constant inspiration to me over the years.

Is Mr. Collins still alive? Has there been any effort from the Paizo staff to try to wrangle him into contributing more content?

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=217100

There is lots of discussion on how to improve Dragon here, but I thought you all might be interested in a lengthy discussion from another board with some new viewpoints on the issue.

Does anybody happen to know what Dragon magazine's circulation numbers looked like at their highest (probably in the 80s?) versus where they are now? Are the numbers currently on an upswing, or a downswing?

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about the state of the hobby. Is it really shrinking? Will it soon die? That sort of thing. It's got me a bit depressed. I'm hoping that some numbers will give me some hope. Perhaps it's not as bad as it seems?

Thanks!

Flipping though my copy of Dragon #134 today, and all I have to say is: I hope you guys don't pull any punches with the death wind in your writeup, because, man, that has the potential to be an awesomely brutal surprise for a cocky party of PCs who think they know what's what because they've perused some dracolich stats in a Forgotten Realms book before. :)

It states in the text that Vecna was supposed to have spent a lot of time here before he vanished from Oerth, and it even has his "hand and eye" symbol on the wall to clue you in to that. But why would Vecna have employed this symbol before his physical body was destroyed, leaving only the Hand and Eye behind?

I sent an email a couple days ago requesting that my pre-order #555952 be cancelled but have recieved no reply.

Was my email recieved?

I pre-ordered a copy of FUDGE 10th Anniversary Edition a while back and I have a few questions:

1. When I placed the order, I entered my address, but I'm moving this week and I don't see an option on the website to change the mailing address associated with a pre-order the same way I was able to with my Dragon and Dungeon subscriptions. Did I just miss it or does that have to be done manually by you guys? I don't want it shipping to my previous address, after all.

2. Do you have an estimated ship date for this product yet?

Thanks!

Here's a thought: Do any of you, as GMs, feel that you might be inclined to "fudge" more in favor of the PCs during an AP adventure than during a normal stand-alone adventure, just so you can be sure you'll get to "use" the whole AP?

I mean, if you get a TPK in a normal adventure, your players can just make up new PCs and play another one, but if you get a TPK in an AP adventure, you may be unable to use any of the other AP adventures that follow with that group, since replaying earlier episodes with new characters can be boring and weird and just starting new characters where the old ones left off can be awkward to explain.

Thoughts?

I understand that WotC is probably riding you guys to push this stuff as hard as you can, but this reader's opinion: I would guess that a low single-digit percentage at best of your readers are using Eberron, especially if the rumors about how it's fallen far short of WotC sales goals are true. One or two Eberron adventures a year is a better idea.

The baseline monk class seems to reflect striking martial arts like karate and most kung fu. I myself study martial arts like aikido and aikijujutsu which are focused on throws, pins, joint locks, and, when neccessary, chokes and joint breaking and/or dislocation. When one does strike, it's with the sole aim of stunning or unbalancing an opponent in order to create an opening in which to apply one of the techniques mentioned above as opposed to causing massive damage with the blow itself.

I could see this working as a core class variant or a prestige class. My "d20 fu" is just really weak, so I'd leave this for somebody else to actually write-up. :)

Maybe it's just me and I didn't notice this trend before, but flipping through issue 331, I didn't notice one tattoo, piercing, anime spike hairdo or S&M armor made entirely of straps and buckles. It seems as though the art direction is finally starting to abandon what I derisively call "XTREME D&D" and is moving back to something more in line with earlier editions of the game and of classic swords & sorcery art in general. Good show! It has been a while since I've been able to look at one of your mags and say "Hey, that's D&D art." About time D&D's look got back to being inspired by Howard and Tolkien and away from emulating Mountain Dew commercials.

Now if you could curb the "urban primative" elements of some of the NPC portraits in Dungeon, all could be well again.

I ordered a copy of Fudge Now Playing at the Paizo store last Friday and as of today (Wednesday) it's still waiting shipment.

Is there a problem? When can I expect my book to arrive?

But I don't think it's anybody's fault.

As I was reading through old Dragon issues from the 1980s today (as I often do), I was again visited by the feeling that the magazines I was reading were somehow something more than the ones published today.

Sure, they were still mostly things like new monsters and spells and such, but the mag somehow felt different then. More meaningful on a deep level. More important.

So I thought for a while about why that might be, and I came up with this:

a) Nostalgia. It feels more important because it's older.

b) Better content. The magazine really was put together better back then.

But the more I thought about it, the less these explainations satisfied. Sure, the magazines have a classic feel and sure, the content agreed with my preferences more on some levels then (old-school b&w art, longer articles, less crunch and more fluff), but that doesn't really explain what I was feeling: That the mag was just more important then.

Then it occured to be that the Dragon of the 80s and early 90s served one very different function from the one today. Specifically, it was the foundation of the pre-internet D&D community!

You have to remember that, at the time, there were no D&D websites and no D&D forums. Communication within the community on a worldwide level, relied on just two things: Major conventions and Dragon Magazine. Other than that, an individual gamer looking for new ideas and new perspectives on his hobby basically had to either make them up wait for gamers new to the area to wander into his FLGS one day. Dragon was like EN World, RPG.Net and WotC's official site all rolled into one. And then some. It brought the various geographically-isolated gamers of the world together in something collectively bigger and more diverse than any one play group.

Nowadays, Dragon is still good, but it's no longer essential. We have online forums instead of the venerable Forum. There are other places to go to get roleplaying news, game eratta, new pespectives on the hobby, etc, all of which are updated in real time. Dragon is no longer the cornerstone of the worldwide D&D community. It's just a monthly game suppliment. A good one, but just one. And that's nobody's fault.

So I suppose there's no going back to what Dragon once was, but it sure is interesting to ponder the change.

As an aside, I can't help but wonder how Dragon's decreasing importance to the community as a whole has impacted the circulation figures between, say, 1984 and 2004?

One trend I've noted recently in adventures like Throne of Iuz and Fiend's Embrace is that while they make use of certain priminent Greyhawk NPCs as "off-stage" background material, these same NPCs are not integrated into the adventures themselves in any meaningful way.

Is it too much to ask for NPCs like Iuz and Iggwilve to actually APPEAR in the adventures they inspire? I think it would be quite cool, even if it was just a cameo.

Does this stem perhaps from the (kooky, IMHO) mindset that if an PCs appears, there absolutely HAS to be complete stats furnished for them? I can see how that might make using powerful NPCs annoying, but still... Not every NPC is supposed to be fought in every adventure.

Is it cool to start threads discussing non-d20 games here? I love D&D like you wouldn't believe, if by "D&D" you mean beholders, dungeons, magic missile and such. My feelings on the d20 system, on the other hand, are much less...congenial.*

What do you say, Paizo guys?

* Translation: I prefer to translate my favorite fantasy game into a set of rules that doesn't make me want to stab my face and groin with an ice pick until I die. :)

I just got my copy or issue 329 and it SEEMS like the paper the mag is printed on is noticably thicker and more opaque.

If this is actually the case and I'm not just hallucinating, then hooray for Paizo! Long-term durability is important in my Dragon issues, as evidenced by the ancient Dragons of decades past that still lurk on my bookshelves.

I'm bumping this because I can, dammit.

Reading through my issues of Dungeon lately, it occured to me that it's a rare monster indeed that doesn't have either class levels or some sort of exotic template. What ever happened to just plain old gnolls, ogres, etc? Instead, we get all sorts of oddball combinations, most of which require massive amounts of space in the text to detail their game stats. Now, a little variety can be good every now and then, but baseline creatures exist for a reason. You can't invoke any sort of reaction from unusual creatures if their usual counterparts are paradoxically more rare. In other words, if everybody the PCs encounter is an exception, what's the point of the rule?

Not to mention all that space in the text that the stats take up. Personally, I'd rather have some of the space dediated to statting-out the half-fiendish advanced elemental ogre sorcerors (or whatever) given over to describing more encounter areas or more details on NPC personalities and motivations.

In a perfect world, a little restraint would be shown and this phenominon would be limited to no more than one or two (or even no) "oddballs" per adventure.

- Yamo, chaotic axiomatic half-dragon pseudonatural beholder barbarian 11/horizon walker 4

This is intended as a sort of "roundtable discussion" on a subject very near and dear to the grodnard in me: Fiction as a device for presenting new campaign setting details and game mechanics in Dragon.

When we old-timers get together to discuss the merits and flaws of Dragon over the years, one complaint seems to get raised over and over. That complaint is that the issues of Dragon that support the most recent D&D versions (3.0 and 3.5) just lack the proper feel; that they're nothing more than dry lists of feats, spells, magic items, prestige classes and other "kewl powerz" with no...spark of life about them.

Sure, some of this can be chalked-up to nostalgia, but a lot of it, I believe, is simply the truth. The "laundry list" method really does dominate a lot of 3.0/3.5 material in Dragon. This isn't really new. It's mostly been the default method of presenting rules expansions from the beginning.

The key term there, however, is "mostly."

Looking at a few old Dragons from the early 90s today, I spotted several features that presented rules bits in a totally different and, in my opinion, much more engaging way. In features like "Voyage of the Princess Ark", "Ecology of the (fill in the blank)", and Ed Greenwood's various articles, the bulk of the article was a short fiction piece decribing monsters, spells, settings and such while all of the game mechanics were presented as footnotes at the end.

Wow, does this make a difference for me! I find myself coming back again and again over the years to reread these issues, whereas I'm currently lucky to make it through another dry list of new feats once. Hearing the "crunchy bits" described in action as part of an entertaining fantasy tale never fails to make me dowright excited about using each and every one in my own game. What was once dry is now dynamic; really "alive" for me, so to speak.

Now, granted, some of these tales were pretty cheesy. Elminster and Mordenkainen discussing the downfall of Raistlin over a glass of Coke in Ed Greenwood's living room? But despite the more tongue-in-cheek aspects, they were good fun reads, pure and simple.

I would love nothing more than some fun and fantasy served up alongside my new rules bits again, but I can see how others might disagree.

What do you think?

My, oh my. This is fantastic. Amazing, even. What a piece of work. It's detailed and utterly gorgeous. Even better than the Darlene maps from the original box. Definitely the best "freebie" I've ever recieved with an issue of any magazine. Thanks, guys. Your hard work had definitely been worth it.

I've noticed a depressing pattern in Dungeon over the last few years. Too much dungeon!

To clarify, "dungeon" in this context really means "site-based adventure." For example, my most recent issue fearures three adventures, all strongly site-based. Fallen Angel's "dungeon" is a collapsed tower, Touch of the Abyss' is a literal dungeon and Winding Way's in a monestary.

The pattern in clear:

1) Acquire target.
2) Travel to linear enclosed area, beat up target and take its stuff.

The only exception recently has been in the Adventure Path adventures, where we also have:

3) Find out at the last minute that there's an even bigger target lurking in another linear, enclosed area. Go back to step 1 when you get your next issue.

Now, I want to clarify right up front that there's absolutely nothong wrong with this type of play. It represents the core of D&D. Heck, the magazine is called Dungeon! It's no worse than any other style of adventure.

But a non-stop diet of anything is just mind-numbing! Dungeons crawls are not bad roleplaying (despite what some would have you believe), but they are only one kind. Roleplaying as a whole encompasses much more.

What about murder mysteries? Horror (in the true sense, not just D&D with undead monsters)? Tense political maneuvering? Wilderness exploration?

I remember that a lot of older Dungeon issues seemed to have been designed with this principal in mind. One Side Trek I recall was an encounter with a bunch of fueding Viking types squabbling over the carcass of a beached whale. Do the characters save the whale? Help one side or another assert their claim (with force of arms, if necessary)? Try to reach an equitable compromise between all parties? Seize the valuable creature for themselves? You have a tense, challenging (mentally, ethically and potentially physically) encounter with a multitude of possible outcomes and no random monster tables or maps of twisty little corridors in sight.

Is it too much to ask that at least one adventure every issue or three not follow the "kill the Big Bad in the maze" formula? Variety is the spice of life, and too much is too much.

WHY DO I HAVE TO PUSH ON THROUGH 42 PAGES BEFORE I GET TO THE FIRST REAL ROLEPLAYING ARTICLE?

This is indicitive of a serious problem, you guys. There are thousands of magazines out there filled with articles that have nothing to do with roleplaying. Trying to make Dragon one of them is just daft. Correct, please.

Everything after page 42 is great this time around, at least, but still. Half the magazine should not be a half-assed attempt to go places Dragon was never meant to. That is a recipe for overall mediocrity.

Now that the first one has completed, the time has come to say this:

When I read through a normal Dungeon adventure, and decide not to use it, I'm only "down" one adventure.

One you do one of these huge Adventure Path things and I read the first adventure and decide not to use it, that's a dozen future adventures (at least) that I'll also get no use out of.

They really drive the value of the magazine down for anyone who elects not to use them. Maybe if Dungeon had room for five or six full length adventures each month, it might not be so much of a problem, but with each one taking up a full third of the adventure content in each magazine, that's just too much space devoted to something that many of us will never use.

You may as well spend a quarter of every issue supporting the old Al Quadim setting. The Al Quadim fans would love it. The rest of us may as well tear that section of the mag out and burn for warmth for all the good it will do us.

What I'm driving at is: The utility of the Adventure Path premise doesn't come close to justifying its space requirements.

I was flipping through some of my older Dragon issues today (early 90s) and noticed something. The older issues used a much thicker, more durable grade of paper than the current ones. In fact, with newer issues, it's not only often possible to look at a page and see the outline of what's printed on its other side, but also to sometime see the outline of what's printed on the the facing page. The current paper is also much more prone to tearing.

Is there any chance of getting the paper quality upped again? I like to keep my magazines for the long haul, so quality materials are important.

Flipping through some of my older Dragon issues (early 90s, in this case), I noticed that the paper that the magazine was printed on in those days was quite a bit thicker and more durable than it is now. With the paper currently in use, it's even possible to look at a white area on a page and see not onlt what's printed on the opposite side of that same page, but sometimes also the outline of what's printed on the previous facing page. It also tears much easier.

Is a better quality of paper a possibility?

Entirely new magic systems for D&D. Vancian memorizing is rather tired and the sorceror class was a good start, but there's so many more options possible.

Man, I used to love Roleplaying Reviews in the old Dragon. I love D&D, but I credit Dragon's review column for opening my eyes to a variety of new and exciting games that broadened my view of the hobby and kept me interested all these years. I especially enjoyed the theme columns, such as the one where three difference sourcebooks on Vikings, psionics, etc were compared, contrasted and rated and the horror-themed Halloween installments.

I would never have known about games like great Champions, Vampire the Masquerade, Amber Diceless, etc if not for Dragon.

So what I propose is this: Instead of a bunch of columns about video games and novels, things that have nothing to do with D&D or roleplaying in general, why not a new, impartial non-d20-exclusive RPG review column? After all, there's a whole world of great, quirky and revolutionary games out there and anything that highlights that is a good thing.

That would be a real service to gamers, especially the non-internet-addicted ones that are frequently cited as an important demographic by the Paizo folks.

Thoughts?

Finally, a forum where I can easily make comments. I've had this one brewing for a long time:

Looking through my old issues today, I was utterly enraptured by the covers. 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.

And it's not just me. Whenever the subject of Dragon comes up anywhere on the internet in any forum, this sentiment is echoed again and again. Never have I witnessed, even once, a participant in a Dragon-related discussion express a preference for the new cover style over the old.

So, what do you say? Will you give us what we want and make Dragon beautiful again?