Eventually, every dungeon master winds up guilty of illusionism: You offer the players a choice that seems to matter, and then rearrange the game world so all the options lead to the same outcome.
Tuesday, September 22
To be defensive is to react with an overprotective mentality to a situation that perhaps doesn’t warrant it.
I love looking at the design evolution from Unearthed Arcana to finished product to see what kind of tips we can learn from the pros. This week, we have that opportunity with the Path of Wild Magic Barbarian, whose Magic Reserves class feature became Bolstering Magic
Most of the time, humans are going to get a wide variety of cultures and languages, ethnicities and religions… and then the non-human races are just treated as variations on a theme.
Monday, September 21
It’s mobile, defensively-gifted, and potentially devastating. What more could you want from an undead menace?
D&D is a complex game, though, and, handled badly, combat has the chance to become repetitive, frustrating, or tedious. How, then, can we make combat as exciting and evocative as it should be?
In the middle of combat, one of your players, the Barbarian, “Would like to rage”. Great! So now they get a whole slew of bonuses, one of them being resistance to slashing, piercing, and bludgeoning damage. But…What exactly does this mean?
Co-creators Miguel Lopez and Tom Parkinson-Morgan on drawing from classic sci-fi and moving away from D&D’s “old racist shit”.
Sunday, September 20
I have recently been thinking about why I prefer using Experience Points to Milestones.
The bane of my existence as a DM is when a member of the party can cast “detect magic” either at-will or as a ritual.
The trinkets table is used by a variety of backgrounds to give characters something interesting to have in their possession, but at 100… or even 500 more, sometimes you want something unique that doesn’t quite fit.
Some world builders get “trapped by Tolkien” as I like to put it. They think elves must be like Tolkien’s (even though those aren’t traditional), dwarves must be like Tolkien’s, etc.
Saturday, September 19
Music, temperature, isolation, and lighting all contribute to horror.
Cover comes in many forms, yet we as players never seem to use it.
Let your players know when you start a campaign that it is okay if they fail. That some of their characters may die, but they can keep playing.
If you’re trying to give guidance to the group, but don’t want to put them on the Plot Express, here are a few things you can try.