I'm a relative new guy to the forum here, so I'm sure this is probably somewhat of a dead horse to everyone but me. So in advance, sorry. I also know it may earn me the paratrooper landing in a tree in enemy territory award. But here goes anyway.
I keep reading about how Dungeon people felt like Polyhedron was an invasion and a cut into their supply of dungeon romps and adventures. I'm probably the only guy on earth who felt that the Dungeon material was an invasion into my Polyhedron material. I bought just about every mini-game produced (except for the Zoinks! one about rock star crime solvers...erg) and have worn them white and dog-eared from use. I have, on the other hand, never used a single adventure in any Dungeon magazine.
Just a thought. I just wish there were some way to reward the staff enough to get them to come out with a few more of those tasty mini-settings. Heck I'd buy 'em as internet downloads. It's just a shame that such a great source of new gaming products--stuff I actually USE, gets gakked because nobody liked it.
*sigh*
Not much I can say here really - I'm glad its gone and in the end the sales apparently justified loosing it. Maybe there is something else out there in the d20 market - you could look around or possibly some other posters have suggestions.
Personally I occasionally found a bit of Polyhedron material interesting but its a difficult format - trying to appeal to some generic mass of d20 players with a random mishmash of d20 articles is taking a hard road - most players and GMs are playing in some specific type of game, be it fantasy, Apocalyptic, Sci-Fi etc. and the chance that an article would appeal to an individual reader was quite small and I'd think other magazines of this type would face the same problem - any specific article is almost certainly not about whatever the reader is actually playing.
I think this format had more chance to work when most of the readers were teenagers or in their early 20's. Basically then you have groups that know they are going to get together to game on the weekend but are not certain what game they are going to be playing - so if one guy says he has a really cool Indiana Jones style adventure idea everyone else probably plays along.
For most of us older gamers these days we are involved in a specific campaign in which the DM mostly controls. There is little chance that any individual player will stop that to insert an Indiana Jones adventure in - in part because the other players probably won't agree to the disrupting of their campaign and in part because there are not enough hours in the day to design the adventure on top of all the other commitments.
Essentially I think aging demographics have hurt Polyhedron. As a teenager one of the big aspects of gaming was thinking up ideas, adventures etc. just to keep boredom at bay. Now half of us would sacrifice our souls for more time in our busy lives if we could just find a buyer.
I had no real problem with Poly (in my case it invaded my Dungeon rather than your experience with the reverse). Even "Zoinks!" I thought had its redeming features. I did mourn the loss of space in Dungeon even more when the Adeventure Path swallowed up even more space thereby robbing me of a large amount of choice. Don't get me wrong indivually they are just fine its just I think that the whole AP thing can get monotonous after 3-4 installments. I don't think that the minigames really got the space they deserved as only half a magazine and am glad that many of them have made the transition into the corners of D20 Modern. Anything that offers a new and inventive take on RPG can only be good for everyone involved.
GGG