tim (10/07/82)
I would like to cast a vote for game-specific playing aids. Thieve's World was a fluke; in general, the amount of time needed to adapt to your system tends to be rather large. In addition, different systems have different encounters and social structures, and no one aid can capture the feel of all systems. As far as particular aids are concerned, my only experience is with those produced by TSR for AD&D and those from Chaosium for RuneQuest. Chaosium's are vastly superior; although they cost more, there is proportionally more material and play time. Also, they are more open-ended and less deterministic: often in TSR modules, there seems to be only one thing to do and one way to do it. Finally, they are lacking in such obvious absurdities as TSR's impossible maps (see particularly their "crashed spaceship" module) and unbalanced magic items (see "White Plume Mountain", which contains some sparsely guarded items which are more powerful than several artifacts). V'z abg nsenvq gb rapelcg zl anzr, Gvz Znebarl ( hap!gvz )