The Dragon #6, April 1977

It's been a week since I've published, but I've been doing a lot of reading since then, so I should be able to pump out several posts in the next few days.  For now the stream of Dragon issues marches on:

• The issue starts with some alternate rules for Metamorphosis Alpha that discuss starting the game as a human clone.  I'm not interested in the rules themselves, per se, but they bring to mind an issue I meant to discuss in a previous post but forgot to - the philosophy behind character creation.  The rules presented here are for "rolling up" a character in a very literal sense - most everything about the character is determined by dice roll.  Not only that, but as with D&D and other games of this era, some characters are just going to end up better than others depending on how you roll.  For instance, a character might end up with only 1 minor skill, or they could end up with as many as 2 major and 3 minor skills depending on how well you roll.  Even without context as to what major and minor skills are in this game, it's blatantly obvious that the latter character is going to be far more powerful and/or useful than the former.  This is in stark contrast to modern sensibilities, where games (whether tabletop or computer) go to great lengths to achieve the holy grail of balance between characters and character classes.  I would love to see if someone has done a detailed analysis of this aspect of the history of roleplaying, how we transitioned from an era where it was just accepted that some characters were going to be better than others due to chance, to the modern age where we insist - nay, rage on the forums with righteous indignation! - that all characters must be equally powerful and differentiated only by player skill.  Is it the product of societal changes, such as a rise of a socialist mindset that demands more in the way of equality of result?  Is it just the product of the MMO era?  After all, if there were random variations when creating characters in World of Warcraft, what would stop me from just rolling new characters until I got a good one (thus rendering the randomness pointless)?
• There's an interesting article on incorporating sea trade into a campaign - basically letting players act as traders and gain income through sponsoring merchant ships.  It lays out an interesting risk/reward table, where the farther a ship travels the more likely it is to gain a greater profit, but the greater the chance for the ship to be lost as well.  Okay, it's interesting to me anyway.  I know to some players the idea of planning merchant ship itineraries is ludicrously mundane and boring considering they could be out fighting dragons instead.  Personally I'm a huge fan of civilization-building games, and I tend to let this bleed over into roleplaying games.  I want my characters to not only gain power by going up in level, but to also be able to build their own little "empire", so to speak - but I know that's not everybody's cup of tea.  It's why I can't wait to get to the Birthright setting materials, although God knows how long it's going to take me to get there.  I know very little about the Birthright setting, but I do know it is a combination of standard role-playing and domain management, and I fully expect to geek out about it.
• Four whole pages are devoted to a painting guide for Empire of the Petal Throne miniatures.  Skip.
• There's a brief article on an alternate system for determining psionic powers that humorously boils down to basically throw out all the rules in Eldritch Wizardry.
• Another article describes an absurdly cumbersome morale system that now applies to PCs.  How would you like to play a character who just happened to roll a bravery score of 6 and ends up running from every combat?  I'm not a fan of rules like this.  If a player wants to play a cowardly character, that should be their choice, not the dice's.  I believe in the sanctity of player freedom: nothing - not the DM, not the dice - should dictate a character's actions unless some form of magic is involved.  I'll have a lot more to say about this when we get to the Ravenloft setting.
• The Creature Feature section seems to have changed names permanently to Featured Creature, which seems a step backwards to me.  The creature in question this month is the death angel, a kind of grim reaper-type being.  Meh.

There's an ad towards the end for the Dungeon Geomorph sets, which reminds me I've forgotten to mention them before.  Sets one through three were being released around this time, but even though they are D&D products, I won't be making posts on them - there's really nothing to say, given that they're nothing but pre-created dungeon maps.  But real products are almost back - two more issues to go!