LEGENDS: "Tome of Legends" review From: dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig) Date: Sat, 08 Jan 1994 03:07:21 +0000 "The Tome of Legends", a new-players guide to Legends I, is out. Kudos to Charlie Domino et. al. for doing a good job: The guide come pretty close to answering a new player's "five hundred most frequently asked questions". Even experienced players will find it worth mining for odd tidbits, new ideas, and previously-overlooked rules and loopholes. Kudos also to the proofreaders for doing more than just running the text through a spelling checker. Where the rulebooks had well over a hundred typos, this tome had perhaps half a dozen. (I dunno about the reality checking, though: Barbara may have been an inexperienced player at the start of this project, but she certainly wasn't by the end.) The first thirty pages (out of eighty) are devoted primarily to setup advice -- how to choose among setup options and initial strategies and tactics. These seven articles will give the experienced player a lot to disagree with, but they provide good basic advice and useful templates for newer players. Their main collective weakness is that too much of the advice is for players in a vacuum: Initial setups and strategies become different if you are working with one or more allies, and much different if you are working with a large group. (In general, there should have been more player-diplomacy and -interaction advice in the first section.) Another factor -- not nice, but important, that should have gotten more attention is the importance of money: A player who uses Empire turnsheets and three SAs per turn almost from the beginning is going to play much differently from a player who's budgeted a Realm turnsheet and takes care not to overrun it. "Position Expansion through Prestige Diplomacy" has a lot of good advice, but I thought it overlooked or underemphasized a) the value of recruiting zero-prestige characters, b) the value of letting subordinates recruit zero-prestige characters, and c) the value of letting subordinates make information-gathering influence attempts. I'd also have liked to see some discussion of non-D2 approaches to diplomacy. "Lairs, Ruins, and Dungeons" is contained in this section, but would more reasonably have gone in the next. This was one of the weaker articles, as it should have devoted less space to rehashing the rules and more to the tricks of the trade. The next thirty-odd give advice on specific aspects of play. "Covert Operations in Legends" gives largely solid advice. So does "Get the Most out of Your Arcanes (and Priests) in Battle", but it's too short for its subject matter. "Information Gathering in Legends" stood out, not only as a well-written article, but also one which highlights the difference between individual play and factional play -- and the tremendous leverage provided by the latter. "Cities and Legends" had some good advice, but it was irritating, because that advice highlighted what I've always considered the worst thing about the design of Legends -- the tendency to use players to make the computer's life easier, rather than the computer to make the players' lives easier. (It is misleading to blame this on BASIC, as that language brings with it a predisposition towards user-hostile design, but doesn't mandate it. Initial word on Legends II suggests that some of these features will be corrected and others will be carried over.) Although it was particularly visible here, the entire Tome is sprinkled with advice that depends on things like the magic number 2**16-1, or fact that soldiers in guilds and herds in a character's pocket don't eat. "Production in Legends" was similarly irritating, in that it consisted largely of information that *should* have been explained in the rules. "Troop Training and Assignment" has a lot of useful information, but isn't properly pitched for beginners: The author would have done better to devote less space to tricks of the trade and more space to demystifying the battle reports. "Guilds: Why to Build them, What to Do with them" is a good mix of basics that a beginner might miss with advanced tips. "Review of Spells in Legends" could have been better. It contains a lot of good and not-always-obvious advice about specific spells (eg, that Summon Familiar can be recast), but it also devotes a fair bit of space to spells about which there's nothing interesting to be said. A greater emphasis on clever-and-sneaky tricks in this section would have been useful. A general problem for anyone trying to write an article like this is that over half the spells in the system are 'niche' spells -- useless 99% of the time, and invaluable the other 1%. Five pages at the back were devoted to "Bits 'N Pieces" -- snippets of advice -- and seven to an appendix which mostly duplicated information available (but scattered) in the rule books. 10:2 might have been a better ratio. Some of the Tome's advice is obsolete (eg, on dungeons), and some of it is wrong (eg, stealthed characters do *not* show up on scries), but by and large it does exactly what it sets out to do -- which is give new players a huge head start on the learning curve. Nice going! ----- Dani Zweig dani@netcom.com 'T is with our judgements as our watches, none Go alike, yet each believes his own --Alexander Pope Referenced By Up