Quote from: Warthur;731905Congrats on wrapping up the project. Maybe see more of you around the rest of the forum?

If there's anything I want to comment on. I do read other threads a fair amount, even if I don't have that much to say usually. I don't intend to go anywhere.

Quote from: RossN;731928Congratulations on this epic undertaking; truly an incredible project.

I'm lucky enough to have the Dragon Magazine Archive so I able to read along to most of these entries.  I'm sorry to see that (as you noted) 2e was so out of favour by the end - I've always considered it 'my' edition despite, or maybe because I played much more 3 and 3.5.  I still have a few physical copies from that era - one of these days I'm going to play a Merlane (from #237).

There's a name I haven't seen in a LONG time. How's it going?

Quote from: (un)reason;732019There's a name I haven't seen in a LONG time. How's it going?

Oh, fine thanks.  Mostly on RPOL these days - very much into PBP. As I said I've really enjoyed this project.  I'd be tempted to try a Let's Read thread myself if I thought I could complete it.

I'd definitely be interested in seeing you tackle Polyhedron, which I'm not really familiar with at all.

This was an epic effort. I don't play anymore but reading your summaries brought back a lot of great memories. Thank you!

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72 pages. What? You honestly didn't think that after a performance as epic as this, I wouldn't have the energy for an encore? Think again! They did not just one, but five best of's between 1979 and 1986, back in the days when you couldn't just get back issues from the internet, so reprints actually mattered a good deal in helping new players to see the old material. And this gives me a chance to look back and see how my opinion has changed, several years and several tons of perspective later. What still holds up and deserves to be influential today, and what should have been forgotten, never to darken their printers again?

Since we're dealing with old school articles, it's instantly notable that they're a lot smaller than the ones we've got used too, cramming 39 into 68 pages. Paper costs were obviously a bigger proportion of their budget, since they put so much more effort into cramming as much info into the room they had, with smaller typefaces and less art. Looking back over my old reviews, I notice I had a good deal less to say about each article as well. Let's see if that's because there's simply less to say, or it was just lack of experience first time around.


Planes: Our first article is an excellent example of just how impenetrable Gary's prose could be. I know what the planes are, you know what the planes are, but trying to figure it out just from this article would be a far longer process than it should be for it's size. It has a particular obsession with magical weapons losing plusses as you move further away from their plane of origin, which is the kind of rule that just adds extra bookkeeping to the DM's job for the sole purpose of screwing over players. (especially since so many extraplanar monsters required certain numbers of plusses to hurt at all. ) While it may have been one of the first building blocks for the D&D cosmology, we're still a long way from a house that you can actually live in, and this bit of foundation isn't particularly exciting in itself.


How green was my Mutant: Ah yes, a good old-fashioned bit of random character generation. How I have missed ye. Both metamorphosis alpha and gamma world revelled in making your character as weird as possible, and this is one early example, letting you give your character a wide range of colours and body shapes. Curiously, it's pretty much system free, (although, logically, having different numbers of fingers and toes would make a real difference to your capabilities) so you can easily use it for other games. This one still seems both amusing and usable.


Some Ideas Missed in Metamorphosis Alpha: Jim Ward was full of cool ideas in the early days, but sometimes struggled with the mechanics, especially since he was one of the most prone to making overpowered stuff, and running monty haul campaigns. This article is a good example of that, as it provides errata for the items list, and some of it is indeed rather powerful, particularly the sensory intensifiers. It was a time before editors rose to power in the company, and it shows. Could do with more work.


Alternate Beginning for Metamorphosis Alpha: Here's another article that still has lots of general applicability today. Starting your players off as clones who have basic skills but no knowledge of the setting is a good thing to do when it's their first time, and you don't want to waste time doing infodumps. You can do similar things in other fantasy/sci-fi settings by having them start as ignorant peasants who've never left their village, or people from the real world who've gone through a portal/been frozen and woken up in the future. After all, it's worked for stories as different as Narnia and Thomas Covenant. And for all that people can hide their knowledge and try to avoid metagaming, it's never truly the same second time around. Use this trick when it most makes sense. Funnily enough, you can rebuild the 4th wall later.


Hints for D&D Judges: Joe Fischer was one of the people who never became a full writer for TSR, but still played a significant part in D&D's development. Someone was bound to introduce the ranger class eventually, but it might well have turned out very different. Similarly, being one of the first people to write about town and wilderness adventures gives him a little more influence than normal, as this three part article shows. He does put a fairly strong emphasis on mapping, wherever you are, that remained strong throughout the 80's, and has since fallen out of fashion. As with any clear step-by-step advice, this is excellent at helping you be creative when raw inspiration isn't with you, and much of this has fallen out of fashion enough that it feels fresh when reintroduced. There are good reasons to go back to the old school, and things like this are amongst them, because a clear picture of where everything is and why it's there still makes more sense than distorted close-up wide-angle shots and shakycam.

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The Play's the Thing: Ha. I'd forgotten they'd used this article title before Robin Laws so comprehensively made it his own. It's amusing because this is the kind of advice that might have seemed ground-breaking at one point, but we now take it for granted. Invest a little personality into your characters, and make them more than just avatars for fighting and exploration. Very valid when you've been wargaming for years, and view roleplaying as an evolution of that, but oddly enough, something new players are likely to do without even thinking about it. Definitely one of the stranger things about the hobby and how it originated.


Languages: Ah yes, the whole languages rigamarole in OD&D. You got a set amount based on your intelligence, plus a few extra if a demihuman, and that was it, since they had yet to introduce a skill system. Most races only had a single language that everyone spoke. And they never did entirely clear up what the hell alignment tongues were. This can lead to both frustration and amusing parody, as the whole ability to speak Were-St-Bernard indicates. Definitely don't miss this bit of clunkiness, and it definitely reminds me why many people found Runequest preferable as soon as it came out. There are just so much more elegant ways of handling the communication business.


The Development of Towns in D&D: A second, longer set of worldbuilding advice in pretty much the same vein as Joe Fischer's. Your worldbuilding needs to balance ensuring everything is there for the town to survive, and making things interesting for adventurers. Although, really, there seems to be more emphasis on the logistics side of things than making the town interesting in itself, apart from a section on tavern rumours, showing that they primarily see them as a place to go between dungeon-crawls rather than primary adventure locations in themselves. The days when the monsters come too and live among you are yet to come. So this article reminds me that those were more innocent times, and there's a lot of basic assumptions they have yet to be disabused of. So it goes. Muahahaha.  


Let there be a Method to your Madness: This one is also an expansion of the same things said just a few pages ago, talking about building dungeons by considering who built them and what their purpose (and budget) was. Despite there being far less explored territory, they still wound up rehashing themselves even in the early issues. This is a bit tiresome, especially since I've seen variations on this spiel all down the line. You certainly didn't have to do it twice within the same collection, and lose a mark as editors for that.


Designing for Unique Wilderness encounters: This one is ALSO repeating and expanding on Joe Fischer's advice, which makes me think they did this deliberately. Still, at least by offering random terrain generation tables, they're giving more practical assistance than just telling you to think logically about these things, and come up with stuff based on that. But still, this is getting very tiresome, and makes me think this best of could have been even smaller and still retained it's value. NEXT!


The Total Person in Metamorphosis Alpha: We already had an article for determining your physical description randomly in MA. Now we expand that, so you can randomly determine your backstory as well. Actually seems like it's more of use to the DM, as they're more likely to need to make a whole batch of NPC's in a hurry. I suppose it demonstrates how different the default was back then, with random generation as standard. Many people took that for granted all through the 80's. It doesn't seem particularly applicable to games other than MA or Gamma World, so I don't think I'll be able to get much use out of it, but it's still interesting as a historical artifact. This is how building a well-rounded character with depth worked back in the day.


How Heavy is my Giant: The Square-Cube law is such a damper on our fantastical imaginations. It's also a problem in OD&D in particular because of the bounded ability score ranges, making the difference between human peak and giant strength seem too small, while not allowing for truly gargantuan creatures at all. So this little realism in fantasy article is a somewhat frustrating one to be reminded of, but also fascinating because it goes into a good deal of mathematical detail that the D&D rules just can't match up to. You have writers making up monster descriptions on the fly, and then you have to deal with the logical consequences, which can be rather a headache. This is really a precursor to the Ecologies, examining how a monster fits into the world, and how devastating they could really be to the environment. (including the formula for how deep their footprints would be) It's another thing they haven't done in quite a while, and I'm surprised they lost interest in, since you can go endlessly down the rabbit hole by examining the logical consequences of things. Oh well, we'll always have the ones that do exist, and there are plenty of them.

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Notes from a Semi-Successful D&D Player: Sometimes trying to apply logic to your fantasy game ruins the fun. Other times, it makes it even more fun, such as Jim Ward's twinky tricks that take advantage of existing spells and equipment, and use them to brutal effect. Polymorphing, poison, blinding, and the now ubiquitous continual light stone. Use them right and you can win a battle in a single strike. After all, when many random monsters can take out a party member every round, (or a whole bunch in the case of beholders) it's only fair. God, that really rubs in how things have changed, given how much effort they've put in since then to keep you from short-circuiting encounters. It's a whole different philosophy. And one which makes what you learn in game more applicable to real life conflicts, where things are almost never fair. I think this is a case where we could learn from the old schoolers, because if we were put in a challenge under an unfamiliar system, they would kick our asses.


Tolkien in Dungeons & Dragons: This one I definitely remember. The whole D&D is not just based on Tolkien, just because we used his demihumans rant. This is one where I'm feeling a bit more magnanimous than the first time around. Then, I definitely felt that the writer doth protest too much. Now, I can understand more why they'd be irritated that people take one element of what they did and focussed on it to the exclusion of everything else. And I can definitely understand their preference for episodic tales of adventure rather than making the whole campaign into one epic story of saving the world, as it's hard to run those when you have a large rotating pool of players who may or may not be there each session. I do still think they're overstating Middle-earth's uselessness for other adventures though. It was full of weird little magical bits that didn't fit into the larger picture, like Beorn, Tom Bombadil, talking animals (and purses), vampires, etc, and there was plenty of room for other people to make their mark beyond the stories in the Silmarillion, since there were thousands of years and several continents left uncovered. It's well worth mining some more, especially the unfinished tales and histories.


The meaning of Law and Chaos in D&D: This is one I remember very clearly too. Turning D&D from a 3 alignment system to an asymmetrical 5 alignment system, with an 8x11 set of subdivisions within each quadrant as an interim before they went for the full 9 point 3x3 grid. It's just so oddly specific, and yet different from the form they stuck with for 3 editions. (before curiously, moving back toward it in 4e. ) Like their original conception of the planes, I have to wonder where it came from, and why it's so different from the fantasy that was supposedly their inspiration. Here's to uniqueness. After all, it may be risky, but it's what we remember in the long run.


D&D is only as good as the DM: In which Gary reminds us that we shouldn't give out xp and magical items too generously, and let players progress beyond the levels the game is designed to handle. As with the Tolkien in D&D article, there's a definite feel that Gary had a personal vision of what D&D should be, and was a little pissed off that other people wound up playing it in such a different way, and tried to add rules to make the game work better for those playstyles. Sometimes you've got to set your baby free to let it reach it's full potential. This does leave me wondering what 2e would have been like if he'd remained at the helm. Obviously the classes from Unearthed Arcana would have stayed in, but would we have missed out on the huge variety of settings and sourcebooks for things like historical time periods in return. It seems quite probable, since even in 1985 he was calling for a return to the roots of gaming, rather than all this froofy obsession with character detail. Definitely stuff worth thinking about here, and a reminder that our history could have gone in a very different direction at several junctions.


Gary Gygax on Dungeons & Dragons: Another article that reminds us that Gary's view on D&D history was filled with self-aggrandisement, as he makes it absolutely clear that he was more important to the creation of D&D than Dave Arneson. Sure, it was Dave's idea to turn Chainmail into a game of dungeon delving where each player controlled a single character, but Gary did all the heavy lifting to turn it into a publishable manuscript, and most of the early promotional work, and he was proved right when he published it despite Dave not thinking it was ready. Taking responsibility gives you power, and history is written by the winners. (or at least survivors) How differently would the story have been told if someone else was doing it? Even after 30 years of building up a legend, I'm not one to believe the hype.


The Dungeons & Dragons Magic System: Still more ramblings from Gary, as he gets sick of explaining and justifying his design decisions to every new player who doesn't understand why he made it this way and thinks a spell point system would work better. It really isn't rocket science. If spellcasters used a spell point system, they could spam a single spell instead of having to think carefully about their selection and use each one cleverly. Plus if they could use their spells more frequently, the individual spells would need to be weaker for them to remain balanced with other classes. The lengthy memorisation times and rolls to learn spells at all also keep them from being able to dominate the game until they get to high level, and their higher XP costs mean they have to work harder to get to a particular level at all. Really, this serves to point out where both 3e and 4e got it wrong. 3e by removing the logistical checks and balances on wizards and CoDzilla so they no longer had to work harder offscreen to make up for their greater flexibility, and 4e by cutting down their magic selections and capabilities to the point where they were completely nonwondrous in the name of encounter level balance rather than campaign level. No edition has got it entirely right, and this still definitely needs more thinking about. How do we get suitably mythic spellcasters and not leave the warriors feeling overshadowed in out games?

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Monster Reference Table Addition: They didn't start doing april fools issues until the 80's. However, they didn't need too, as they had more than a few silly articles all year round. Such as this one, detailing a whole bunch of joke monsters based on gamer stereotypes. (and also riffing off the fact that many people mistook the % in lair probability for % chance they would lie to you. ) The game may change, but the personality types remain the same, and so this remains entirely applicable today. (although the hippy jokes will probably need to be replaced with appropriate hipster ones ) It's good to be able to laugh at ourselves, which is another thing that grew scarce in the last few years of the magazine.


Miscellaneous Treasure: Following directly on from the last article are the real world based joke magic items, including the ring of wedding, the various levels of magic missile (government surplus) and the dread Bi-labial fricative. More fun but non rules-legal and completely inconsequential stuff that shows just how different their standards for accepting articles were those days, let alone printing them. I find it very interesting indeed that they're putting these in the best of. I suppose as issue 359's top ten list proved, the joke articles are the ones people remember, and talk about again and again. From that perspective, it doesn't seem strange at all.


Deserted Cities of Mars: Whatever happened to the Barsoom influence on fantasy? It's pretty much been superseded by later waves of authors, to the point where the attempt at a big budget John Carter movie completely flopped because the public in general had forgotten about it, and the marketing suuuuucked. That leaves this article feeling very much like an anachronism, like the deserted cities within it, a relic of times before the water dried up and the world moved on. I suppose that means if you do use it, no-one'll see it coming, and they might find the strange architecture cool and memorable. So it goes to show how completely some things can fade from the public consciousness, even in the internet age where nearly everything is two clicks away. How many gems from centuries before have been forgotten by all but the biggest libraries and are just waiting for the right revivalist?


Monkish Combat in the Arena of Promotion: This article feels somewhat less anachronistic, as Rock/Paper/Scissors style combat remains a common thing thanks to the success of Pokemon. With 8 different attacks, and 10 other manoeuvres, it certainly offers a fair amount of tactical choice, so skill in second-guessing your opponent is critical to winning, even if there are power differences. Since it's a completely disconnected subsystem, and the ability scores that you derive your stats from have remained the same throughout the editions you could use it as a diversion in 1e, 3e or 4e if you felt like it. Funny how that kind of thing works out. Some things seem timeless, while others look terribly dated a few years later, and you can never be sure which is which.


Some Thoughts on the Speed of a Lightning Bolt: Ugh. The whole weapon speed and spellcasting time in segments rigamarole. One of the least used bits of rules in AD&D, and quite rightly so, because it slows the game down so very much. It may serve to rebalance the fighter and wizard a little if done correctly, but it's a lot of work for negative extra fun. It fully deserved to be left out of later editions, and likewise, this article can stay mouldering in the vaults to be forgotten.


What to do when the Dog eats your Dice: This lighthearted little piece, which suggested using things like mexican jumping beans as randomisers on the other hand, remains just about relevant today. The internet makes it far easier to order custom dice of all kinds, all over the world, and you no longer need to colour them in with crayons, but sometimes, they will go missing just when you need them most. The Tom Wham illustrations really add to it, bringing extra humour in a way they just can't do today, even in the april issues, because it would clash with the current art direction. It's not as if they don't have the talent either, as I'm sure Rich Burlew could pull of something with just as much flavour. I don't know. Getting serious and professional can propel you forward, but it can also become a straitjacket.


Excerpt from an Interview with a Rust Monster: Another silly article here, reminding us that adventuring could as easily turn into comedy of errors as it could badass heroics. In fact, it might actually be more common for starting groups, as stories like this continued in the editorials long after they'd vanished from the articles themselves. It also reminds us about Gary's weird love for magical fountains, which I still don't really understand. Why did they play such a big part in the early randomly generated dungeons, other than to make the players paranoid of everything and play cruel practical jokes on them? I suppose that question answers itself, given the other articles in this collection. So this is another good example of the old school spirit in practical action. Sometimes it's just good to be whimsical.


Sturmgeschutz and Sorcery: We've had some non D&D RPG stuff. Now for a little wargaming, as they show us how to cross over D&D and Tractics. An excellent example of how they didn't take genre lines or the 4th wall so seriously back in the old days, partly because they didn't have built up settings and audience expectations to upset. So it's highly amusing to go back to Monsters Vs Nazi's with fresh eyes. The monsters won the sample battle, thanks to the element of surprise, but they set the statistics so things could have gone the other way. After all, automatic weapons have pretty impressive ranges compared to D&D spells, and the heavier artillery matches up to fireballs and lightning bolts in terms of damage. Real world technology can be almost as fantastical as magic, especially in these days of internet and iphones. Still, it's probably easier to do it by combining d20 modern and 3e than kitbashing the old stuff. They might have moved away from it in official products, but the rules developments still make it easier to do it in your own game. Funny how that's worked out.

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Illusionists: Ah yes, the illusionist. Definitely one addition to AD&D that caused a fair few problems over the years. Part of this was that illusion spells were a pain to adjudicate, and became useless against many higher level monsters. The other was the distinction between illusionists and wizards, and what it really meant when high level wizards could do pretty much anything with the right spells, Really, if they wanted strong niche protection, they should have broken up both fighting and spellcasting classes into more specialised types straight away, so each spellcasting class had a more limited selection of tricks. Oh well, way too late to close that particular barn door. If only they could figure out some way to bring fighters and rogues up in versatility to a similar level instead of nerfing the spellcasters.


Illusionist Additions: Following on from the problems raised by the illusionist, we have the problems raised by keeping these two articles in their original formatting, instead of cleaning them up and merging them together. I guess by this point the 1e corebooks were all out, so you could get the updated and revised version of the illusionist (with all these spells and more) in there. So this makes it all the more obvious they're aiming this collection at people who want a bit of nostalgia. Not that I object to that. But it does hit the usability a little. I guess someone would complain whichever way round they did it.


Tombs and Crypts: We already have a fairly substantial random treasure table to make finding out what stuff monsters have to take after you kill them quick and easy. Why exactly Jim Ward thought we needed one specifically for crypts specifically I'm not sure. Chalk it up to a classic case of disconnected design processes. It's also very much a Jim Ward production in that it's exceedingly generous with the treasure it grants, so use with caution, especially if you're also using treasure as xp, for it looks like a relatively easy way to gain a few levels here. Gary might have wanted you to painstakingly earn each level over years of play, but he's not going to get his wish with people like this in the company.


Halflings, Dwarves, Clerics & Thieves in DUNGEON!: Looks like they've even managed to fit in a bit of old boardgaming stuff here. That's how you really know it's an old school collection. And you know, I've still never played the DUNGEON! boardgame, so I still can't say if these additions are balanced or not. Well, they're easy to understand, anyway, which is always important for a pick up and play game. Once again, it's definitely a relief to see the variety in content after slogging through the 3e years.


Statistics Regarding Classes: Bards: Unlike the ranger and illusionist, which were pretty clunky in their original implementations, the bard still looks surprisingly solid as a generalist who can fill in for the fighter, thief or wizard at a pinch, and also has a few tricks of their own on top of that. The charm and lore abilities are actually pretty elegantly implemented, with enemy resistances scaling with level so they don't become unstoppable or useless no matter how powerful they are. It makes Gary's decision to turn them into an exceedingly specific and somewhat clunky multi-class that didn't follow the normal multi or dual classing rules seem all the more baffling. It's a good example that progress doesn't always make things better, especially where creator ego is involved. This time, the original takes it.


The Original Ranger Class: The Ranger, on the other hand, suffers in hindsight for being introduced before the Druid, which also added a substantial suite of nature affecting spells that they really could do with as well. It's also notable for having several features that are completely based upon emulating Aragorn in particular, rather than just woodsy sorts in general, such as the alignment restriction and the ability to use magical items related to scrying. Plus the odd restrictions on followers and bonus xp at low levels instead of just rejigging the tables seem pretty odd and arbitrary these days. This is one class that definitely shows the benefit of refinement over subsequent editions.


Wizard Research Rules: Ah yes, bankruptcy time. The article where they decide to make spell research costs double with each increase in level, rather than the quadratic approach chosen in 3e. Well, I suppose xp costs also doubled with level, and you got most of your XP from treasure back in 1e. Still, it does mean you have to choose between developing a single 9th level spell, or building a decent wizard's tower. Actually, that doesn't seem like such a bad tradeoff after all, since it keeps wizards from getting to the do everything better than you stage so easily. Maybe they should have kept it.


Witchcraft supplement for DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: All these years, and we still have no idea who originally sent this in, despite three subsequent articles building upon it. It's a strange duck, especially in this original incarnation, where they're treated very much as monsters rather than a class with an experience table and proper advancement. The spells are pretty cool though, and full of flavor, as they're powerful but specific, with no fear of inflicting permanent conditions on the players. You may beat these witches but be left shrunken, aged, polymorphed or cursed, requiring another adventure to fix things. On the plus side, you'll also get more than the usual amount of cool magical items if you beat them too. Fair and balanced encounters? Really? I think not. Stuff like this is far more memorable, and makes for better stories too.

Quote from: (un)reason;732836Best of Dragon Magazine 1


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Illusionists: Ah yes, the illusionist. Definitely one addition to AD&D that caused a fair few problems over the years. Part of this was that illusion spells were a pain to adjudicate, and became useless against many higher level monsters. The other was the distinction between illusionists and wizards, and what it really meant when high level wizards could do pretty much anything with the right spells, Really, if they wanted strong niche protection, they should have broken up both fighting and spellcasting classes into more specialised types straight away, so each spellcasting class had a more limited selection of tricks. Oh well, way too late to close that particular barn door. If only they could figure out some way to bring fighters and rogues up in versatility to a similar level instead of nerfing the spellcasters.


Illusionist Additions: Following on from the problems raised by the illusionist, we have the problems raised by keeping these two articles in their original formatting, instead of cleaning them up and merging them together. I guess by this point the 1e corebooks were all out, so you could get the updated and revised version of the illusionist (with all these spells and more) in there. So this makes it all the more obvious they're aiming this collection at people who want a bit of nostalgia. Not that I object to that. But it does hit the usability a little. I guess someone would complain whichever way round they did it.

...

Oh, my favourite class! I admit they are very DM dependent and yes the higher level monsters issue is a problem but thematically I love them.

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Solo DUNGEONS & DRAGONS Adventures: Now this is one article that remains pretty firmly embedded in my mind. The biggest and most interesting article from the first strategic review, I've got a fair amount of use from it over the past 5 years, and it remains useful in other editions, and even other RPG's entirely. Sometimes, you just don't have time to generate a map, and this does the job, even if the results are sometimes a little strange. And of course, sometimes you want that strangeness, as generating random results and then trying to retrofit some logic to them is a fun mental exercise. This is one article that completely deserves it's place here, quite possibly with even higher billing, because it is just so very useful and stimulating. It's just so much easier to be creative when you aren't working in vacuum, with no directions or limitations.


Lycanthropy: The Progress of the Disease: Or goddamnit, don't turn my character into an NPC just as they're getting interesting. Goes to show, right from the beginning, we had to deal with the battle between those who wanted more cool character options, and those who wanted to stick to the rules as written. Of course, in a magazine that constantly needs to deliver new stuff to remain valid, it's obvious who is going to win. Still, as characters lose as many powers as they gain, or more in the case of spellcasters, and it takes a long time to gain complete control over your transformations, I don't think this counts as overpowered. It's certainly no Werewolf: the Apocalypse, but it'll do for now.


The Japanese Mythos:  Now here's a great example of the sheer density they could pack in in the old days, before they decided to have bigger typefaces and pad things out with artwork. A mix of 66 gods, monsters,. heroes and magical items in three and a half pages? That's pretty cool, actually. You know, if they'd gone the other way, and worked on communicating information even more succinctly instead of letting page counts balloon over the years, they could have increased that by a few more orders of magnitude. But that would require a strong pressure to keep page counts low, and we live in times where things like that are cheap and reproduction of information is even cheaper. Maybe if civilisation collapsed, but then we'd have more important things to do than preserving the art of roleplaying. Anyway, the density of the statblocks really makes sense here, since you can look up the finer details of japanese mythology on your own power. I approve, and many modern articles could learn from it.


Random Monsters: Even after only 5 years, D&D had already gone through a fair amount of evolution, and some players had become both experienced and genre-savvy. This certainly applies to the much-missed Paul Crabaugh, who would certainly have contributed a good deal more over the years if he'd lived. Here's one of his early contributions. While it allows a fair amount of randomness, it still shows the limitations of being an early bit of design, with the types of monsters and their capabilities being fairly bounded, rather than truly scary, alien, and open-ended. That said, things like immunity to nonmagical weapons and instadeath poison are pretty nasty, but it's nothing worse than existing monsters. So this is fairly fair by the standards of the day, and players should be able to survive even these monsters if they play smart and don't just attack everything head-on. It just about stands the test of time.


D&D Option: Demon Generation: We end with a second variation on the same theme, this time by an official writer. Curiously, this is actually less balanced, and more likely to produce gonzo overpowered results than the third party one, as demons get very substantial amounts of spell-like abilities, some of which are far better and more flexible than others. These won't be an appropriate challenge until your group is pretty high level. So like Gary's official classes compared to the other ones introduced in the magazine, this is a case where the third party stuff turns out superior, or at least more usable in actual play. Definitely worth noting.


Well, this was certainly a huge breath of fresh air after the 3e years, covering a wider range of topics, and considerably less bound to seriousness and orthodoxy of design. On the other hand, it was very much dominated by Gary and Jim Ward, and both their good and bad aspects were in full play here, unrestrained by the hands of editors. It goes to show, there are good and bad parts to both approaches. As usual, I'm just grateful at this point I can pick and choose the bast aspects of them all. Now let's see what lessons they learned from it, and how they refined the format in the next four best of's.

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85 Pages: 2 years later, the end of 1981, and they're still using exactly the same cover, only in a different colour. The contents are a little different though. they've already dropped their penchant for putting unnecessary Capitals in the Middle of Titles, and divided the articles into themed sections, which is a positive development. Not so positive is that they've already cut out all the non D&D material. A couple of years of meteoric sales increases has made everything else seem secondary, and they have to please their new audience. There might still be several non D&D articles a month in the regular issues, but this all seems very familiar. Oh well, that's how it goes. At least I only have to live through it in microcosm this time around.



NEW NPC'S (OLD FAVOURITES): No surprise that new classes get preferential treatment when it comes to reprints. Although they might be billed as NPC only, no-one took that prohibition seriously, and many people were eager to try out any new bit of crunch we got, since they didn't show up every month, and there were far fewer supplements in general released as well. Until they oversaturated the market, they got a lot of letters asking for more like this. So here we go, time to reap what we sowed.



The Anti-Paladin: No escaping this one, even if they're one class that's actually stuck as NPC's simply because they didn't add an experience table. And hey ho, they still get a fairly extensive suite of powers as they advance to make them look like a good big bad for a party, whatever their level, and they're still selfish assholes who have to be in charge or plotting to backstab the guy who is. I think that concept survives the test of time, even if the mechanics have been refined in later editions. Once more for good luck before we go. Muahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Samurai: These, on the other hand, still look extremely clunky indeed, as they're basically a bunch of extra powers bolted onto the fighter chassis with no drawbacks but the social one. That grew increasingly irksome as I saw it in kit after kit throughout 2e, and I'm not amused to be reminded that it started out this early. At least when they became a class of their own in OA, they had both serious social ties to deal with, alignment restrictions and higher XP costs, plus they lacked the low level larceny abilities Bushi enjoyed. You can't just cram in ideas willy-nilly, it just makes a mess.


Healers: Annoyingly, while healers were a fully functional, if somewhat odd class in issue 3, the reprint here leaves out their XP and spell advancement list, which means they're not usable if you own only this anthology. That makes me very grumpy indeed, as their idiosyncratic spell selection and the order in which they got access to things really made them stand out from standard clerics. The editors really aren't doing their job properly here, making this pretty disappointing so far compared to the previous best of.


Berserkers: The animal totem berserkers from issue 3 also look somewhat goofy in hindsight, with their restricted maximum intelligence being particularly amusing, but at least they're fully functional as a class, (or actually a set of 5 classes) with XP tables, followers at high levels, incentives to act appropriately, and drawbacks. I can definitely see these playing a substantial part in a campaign as NPC's, and players wanting to be one too. They may have been done better in 3e as a prestige class, but these still at least have a certain charm to them.


Scribes: These on the other hand, don't feel so much like a proper class, as a big fuck you to players, forcing them to rely on others and spend substantial amounts of money by creating an arbitrary monopoly, when they could be creating and copying spells easily enough themselves. I'm not amused at all to see that kind of thinking perpetuated here. If there's one thing the internet age has done, it's breaking down the gatekeepers, and shown nearly anyone can do it themselves and broadcast anything around the world. You don't have to pitch it to a network, get signed to a label or follow union regulations, and most so-called big secrets aren't that impressive at all once you know them. And honestly, even though it's harder to make decent money being creative, it's probably better that way. So this kind of thinking can stay in the past where it belongs.

Best of Dragon Magazine 2


part 2/6


The Ninja: And these, like samurai, serve to remind us that orientophillia was common in roleplaying right from it's birth, since martial arts movies were big in the early 70's. For whatever reason, people just couldn't resist making oriental classes more powerful than their western counterparts. So it proves here, with another article that's a grab bag of cool powers in no particular order, and some seriously messy mechanics, like the strange HD progression and small chance of fooling alignment detection. Anyone who tried to play one of these in a party with other classes would be most irritating. It just rubs in once again how much their writers and editors had to learn about making rules that not only held up under examination, but were easy to read in the first place. And this is supposed to be a best of. I got nuthin.


The new, improved Ninja: And a year later, we got another load of powers, nearly all of which are simply added onto the existing class, and accessible from 1st level, making them even more powerful with no price or drawback. They're just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. I find it very odd just how inferior the collection of classes here is compared to the last best of, where they all made it into the official books. They really ought to have given it 3 or 4 years to get more good material, instead of rushing them out as fast as they could, and in the process bringing back lower quality stuff from the same issues as before.  



FROM THE SORCERORS SCROLL: In the early years of TSR, Gary had to put in a LOT of work to keep things going. This included the magazine, where he contributed something pretty much every issue. Of course, not all of it was good. Ed Greenwood eventually came along, outmatching him in both quantity and consistency, but up to 1985, Gary's columns were one of the most talked about parts of the magazine. So like the classes, I'm really not sure if I'm going to like this, but I'm pretty sure it'll be interesting, because Gary was always forthright with his opinions. Let's see which ones they picked as worth remembering for the ages.



D&D Relationships: A whole and it's parts: Ah yes, the whole D&D vs AD&D rigamarole. That confused many people over the years until they reunited the streams for the new millennium. It's no wonder Gary had to explain it. And it's also no surprise that he keeps schtum on the real reason it happened, the disagreements between him and Dave Arneson, and desire to keep him from getting as big a share of the royalties long-term. Not that they didn't need to make a new more self-contained version of the game aimed at new players who had never wargamed, and didn't have the Chainmail booklets to draw upon, but that certainly wasn't the whole story. So this article definitely feels a bit disingenuous in hindsight. Can't let the punters know your weak points. Sigh.


Ground and spell area scales: Another old thing that is no longer relevant after several rules revisions and thankfully so. Spell and movement rates being different depending on if you were above or below ground was an awkward kludge that stemmed from D&D's wargaming roots. Even vastly scaled down to 25mm, some things, like bow ranges were still a problem to fit on a table, so they had to fudge things. This is why just using your imagination will always seem more epic. As long as you're using minis, you're bound by their limitations, and the most gargantuan, unstoppable instakilling city-threatening monster they'll ever face will be the family cat. Very glad that I never bothered with them.


Realism vs game Logic: Looks like we're going to go through these columns in chronological order, as the first two were from issues 14 & 15, and this one is from issue 16. However, while the first two seemed laughably dated, this one remains very relevant, as it is a war still fought upon internet forums daily.   People claiming a supernatural being or magic system isn't "realistic" are kinda missing the point, since it's supposed to be unrealistic, and working too hard to make a game realistic sucks out the fun anyway. There's a ton of little digressions that aren't so relevant to the current situation, but the big underlying principle remains the same. Just seems to be part of human nature to tinker with the rules, try and make them what you want to do better, and often making a dreadful mess in the process when you don't understand the knock-on effects your changes will make. And as long as we have people dying off and new ones coming in, the same old mistakes will be made again.

Best of Dragon Magazine 2


part 3/6


What the game is; where it's going: We skip forwards 7 months, to find things are accelerating rapidly. Gary is currently very aware that sales are skyrocketing, bringing in thousands of new players every month, more than they managed in the whole of 1975. As a result, he once again has to explain things to the newbies. This means there's some overlap with the D&D relationships one, but also a load of talk about D&D's influences, and his plans for the future, including computer games, new modules, and accessories to make things more accessible. This does make me wonder if collecting all of these was the best idea, since any repetition in the topics will be exaggerated by proximity in a way that they weren't in the original magazines. You can definitely have too much of a good thing.


Much about Melee: Straight away, my point is proven as Gary has to talk again about realism in D&D, this time as it pertains to minute long combat rounds, and how one attack per round is a representation of lots of actual attacks, only a few of which actually do serious damage. He also has to tell people again why there is no critical hit & fumble system in official AD&D rules, as he feels it would turn out more of a problem than a benefit to players in the long run. Characters at low levels are already pretty likely to die from a single hit anyway, and as they get to higher ones, part of the fun is becoming suitably superhuman. I remain skeptical, since the 10 or 6 second rounds of BD&D and 3/4e seem to work better, especially when it comes to monsters with several different types of attacks. I think this was a case where he was too close to the issue to be objective about the problems.


Character social class: Now here's one that's still both fun, and usable whatever system you're playing with. Social classes and government may vary a fair bit from country to country, but it always involves a pyramid, with relatively few people in the ruling classes, and an increasingly broad base of poorer and less influential folks in the middle and bottom. Exactly who ends up on top, and how they did it can vary widely though, and the list of sample government types, some of which don't exist in reality, give your imagination plenty of fuel. (and an idea of how to derive more) The first article this issue I'm really happy to see.


Looking back, and to the future: Back to the bullshit, as they once again try to make it very clear that D&D and AD&D are completely different games, and so whatever part Dave Arneson may have had in the creation of D&D, he had no part in the creation of AD&D, so we don't have to pay him anything for it. This is also the one where Gary goes on about AD&D being intended for Official Tournament Play, so you must adhere to the Rules As Written, while you can house-rule D&D to your heart's content. A hardline stance that also seems fairly amusing in hindsight, given how often people simply ignored the more fiddly little rules like weapon speeds. This reminds me that the reason AD&D got far more modules and other supplements than D&D up to the mid 80's was due to politics, not because it sold more, with the Moldvay & Mentzer basic sets both selling more than anything else they ever did. And it makes me wonder if D&D would have sold even more if it weren't for them muddying up their own brand in the name of power struggles between the creators. I guess it's water under the bridge now, since they're both dead. But it's still not something I'm particularly amused about being reminded of again.


Evil: Law vs Chaos: Having turned the 3 point alignment system into a 9 point grid, they now have to justify that by explaining the differences between lawful evil and chaotic evil, and what it means in actual play when you're going to try and kill them all regardless. So Gary picks the most extreme examples, the denizens of the lower planes. Basically, it all boils down to domination vs destruction. The Hells are one big ugly hierarchy, with tendrils of manipulation stretching down into many prime material worlds as they try to secure as many souls for themselves as possible. Meanwhile the abyss is an even bigger, just as ugly roiling mess, and the two do not get on at all. The blood war might have been formalised in 2e, but it's seeds are very much here in hindsight. This article works from the assumption of alignment languages, and that people are aware of what alignment they are, which does make it seem rather dated. (and also that like-minded people naturally attract and work with each other, which I certainly haven't found to be the case in real life) It reminds me that morality as "sides" in a great cosmic battle is specific to a pretty small amount of stories, with most having a more relativistic view of things. It's no wonder that many people found alignments a problem, since they only work with certain unstated assumptions. If you wanted your fantasy a little more down to earth, then D&D is not a good fit, and becomes increasingly less so as you level up.

Best of Dragon Magazine 2


part 4/6


Humans and Hybrids: In which we get another example of how Gary's conservatism affected the game in the early years. While they did introduce a fair few new classes right away, they stuck with basically the same races until well into 2e, and those they did add had far lower class selections and level limits. Not until 3e would they truly open up monsters for PC play and add templates and bloodline levels that let you crossbreed racial lineages however you desire. Of course, he did have good reasons. Until they added proper balancing factors for the cool abilities nonhumans get, they couldn't make them too awesome, or no-one would want to play the standard races. Really, this just illustrates that system matters. For all that they say your imagination is the only limit, if you try to do certain things within a roleplaying game, some will work out far better than others, and what they are will vary widely. And D&D was not designed as a toolkit game, despite later writers adding on all sorts of things to try and make it so, there are still plenty of other RPG's that are far better at modular toolkit design and adapting to whatever genre you want to play. D&D was built for exploring places and killing things in tactical battles, and the farther you push from that, the more it pushes back.


Books are books, games are games: Following directly on from the last column, Gary has to deal with the new players who try to play D&D like their favourite fantasy novel, and find it doesn't do that, much to their frustration. Of course, being the iconoclastic and often grumpy bugger he was, he puts a lot of effort into trying to get them to change their playstyle to fit the game, rather than changing the game to better support that kind of story. If your characters were as cool as the heroes of the books, they'd be unmanageable! Of course you shouldn't expect to have powers as awesome and flexible as theirs! Why are you surprised by this? Now there's an attitude that would prove pretty persistent in gaming, as we had plenty of modules where all the big action was done by the NPC's, with the PC's given bullshit fetch missions or just left watching on the sidelines, because they had a metaplot they wanted to push rather than giving you the tools to tell your own story. This definitely leaves me annoyed, as this collection is turning into a lot of him telling us we're having badwrongfun for wanting to play D&D differently to the way he intended. What a thing to compile.


Make-believe magic: Returning to the realism in fantasy topic again? Blah. Gary reminds us that in most fantasy literature, most wizards are actually less powerful than high level spellcasters in D&D, with extensive preparation and ritual needed to pull off big effects. The memorisation and erasure thing was pretty much unique to Jack Vance, and his spellcasters could maybe hold half a dozen at once. It's very much a system designed to keep them interesting and balanced when compared with other classes (over the course of a campaign), rather than emulate a particular novel, especially when things vary so widely throughout the fantasy genre anyway. I think the big problem here was making all spellcasters use the same system, since it seemed to go away once we had the mixture of memorisation, spontaneous casting, spell point psionics, lower power but constantly usable warlock evocations, etc etc that 3e brought us. (that and the people dissatisfied with D&D had moved onto other systems ) Once again this shows that the problems people initially complained about in D&D were solvable (although solving them created new ones) but the designers were too stubborn to do so for 20 years, and instead tried to tell us we were wrong for wanting something different. Looking at it from that perspective, is it any wonder TSR went out of business?


Good isn't stupid: Paladins & Rangers: We covered the evil side of the law/chaos axis a few columns ago, now for the good one. Oddly enough, Gary takes a more relativistic view here, talking about how standards of good vary widely between cultures in the real world, and how losing your powers should be judged based upon the god you follow rather than a more abstract "good". When you consider that he was advocating all Lawful Evil creatures everywhere should try and serve the devilish hierarchy a few issues ago, this seems a little inconsistent. Also notable because this is where he advocates swordpoint conversions followed by immediate death as a way to ensure your god gets souls, which really doesn't seem like Good behaviour to me. It remains very easy to see why he caused so much controversy back in the day, because this just seems so counterintuitive. Why must morality be such a headache?

Best of Dragon Magazine 2


part 5/6


MONSTERS AND MISCELLANY: Our first two chapters definitely showed the quality hit from sticking to a theme over simply picking the best articles. Since this last one is just another collection of general stuff, hopefully that won't be the case here. Still, they have only had two years to pick up more, so I'm not hugely optimistic. It may well have been just too soon for a second best of.



Theory and use of gates: Our first Ed Greenwood piece to make the cut, reminding us that he started making his mark as soon as he was published. This fun little romp certainly fits the bill, taking us through the worlds of Michael Moorcock and Philip Jose Farmer, both of which have plenty of inspiration for your fantasy campaign. Universe-spanning adventures are challenging, but they give you the widest range of options, especially as a DM, and allow for really long campaigns, as you can switch things up whenever they get boring, and put people in universes where their old tricks don't work when they get too powerful. If they're truly an incarnation of the eternal hero, they'll find a way to accomplish awesome things regardless. The whole multiverse is your oyster, get out there and grab some pearls from it the way Ed has.


Inns and taverns: Back down to the ground with a bump, with a little general setting stuff. Since PC's will have to stay in inns and taverns unless they have contacts wherever they go, the skill to live off the land, or the magical power to conjure their own lodgings, you do need some info on how to handle them as a DM. As Gary included some stuff like this, complete with price list in the Keep on the Borderlands module with the next D&D basic set, it seems that advice was taken on board as they tried to make the game more user-friendly.  After all, it doesn't take too much space, and it comes in handy pretty regularly, so it makes a lot of sense to keep it in your toolkit.


Good evening: Len Lakofka was making contributions to D&D since the Strategic review days, but this was the first one under his Leomund's Tiny Hut column. Since this still feels like an extended Sage Advice piece, nerfing the vampire wherever there is any ambiguity as to the extent of their powers, I'm not very impressed by it, just as I wasn't back in the day. They could definitely have put a more constructive article in it's place.


Varieties of Vampires: The sheer number of bloodsucking monsters from myths around the world still amuses me, and this article reminds me that their popularity started before D&D came out, and has never really gone away. Vampires are no more a fad than sex, chocolate or cars. Maybe at some point in the distant future they'll fall out of fashion, but only if the world changes substantially and something else takes their niche in the public consciousness. In the meantime, this collection of 14 variants are easily adapted to other systems, given the small amount of detail each gets, so this article remains useful as inspiration even all these years later.


A look at Lycanthropy: This one also seems pretty relevant, given the wide variety of lycanthropes we've seen in fiction, and how the different degrees of transformation and self-control can be multiplied out by the number of animals you could turn into. Even if some bits of the rules are D&D specific, it's another one where the basic concepts serve as a good checklist for other systems, so you can tell the kinds of stories with infectious shapeshifters that you really want too. Course, if you want the hereditary ones, you'll still want to go with White Wolf, but that's a story for another time. We can't work miracles in a two page article.


Blueprint for a Lich: Unlike vampires and werewolves, liches are very specific to D&D, and the method for creating them especially so. As with Shades, they prevent them from gaining levels after transforming, which seems to be put there mainly to discourage PC's from becoming one, and would be rapidly thrown out in later editions. This along with all the other fiddly bits here, very much lacks iconic resonance, and it's no surprise that later methods of eternal life are a little easier and less risky. It's very much a means to an end rather than an end in itself, so there's no reasons for wizards to get hidebound about their procedures. Movin' on up.