Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition
How deadly is your Dungeons & Dragons game? Do players go into each combat wondering if their character will survive? Do they avoid combat? Or do they rush in, knowing their chance of losing their character is very low? People enjoy different things. And, even in the early days of the game, there were varying desires for how deadly it should be. Consider that hit … Continue reading Deadliness, Options, and Risk
Players looking at the original form of Dungeons & Dragons may be surprised to discover how little Plate Armour costs. You could get the best non-magical Armour Class as a starting character. I find this interesting. In the beginning, a level 1 character had 1d6 hit points. If a monster hit you, you would take 1d6 damage. When you reached 0 hit points, you died. … Continue reading The Tension between Armour Class and Hit Points
As I continue to examine the older documents of my Dungeons & Dragons campaigns set in the World of Greyhawk, I discovered this oddity – a list of rumours assembled after the fact to describe what happened for several years of the campaign. It is a long document, so here I present only the events described for 581 CY. This is in the period leading … Continue reading Rumours from the World of Greyhawk – 581 CY
Going back through my past reviews, I discovered this one on a defunct website, so I’m reposting it on my main blog. Wizards released Races of Stone in August 2004 for Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 edition. This review originally appeared on 3rdedition.org, but sadly that site has been defunct for many years. Races of Stone represents a departure by Wizards of the Coast from the … Continue reading 3E Supplement Review: Races of Stone
One thing that greatly irritates me about Pathfinder is the plethora of conditional modifiers. There are usually very good game-world reasons for those modifiers, but the more of them there are, the harder it gets to keep track of everything. I just noticed one of them in the latest blog entry on PF2, Secrets of Alchemy. Now, thematically this is a fantastic item. It’s very … Continue reading Pathfinder II – Modifier Madness
Dungeons & Dragons, 3rd Edition was a major change to how Dungeons & Dragons worked. Over the years, AD&D 2E had become a sprawling beast that had a lot of very good ideas, but no unifying mechanics. Every supplement presented new ways of doing things and the resulting system had turned into rather a mess. So, 3E (which dropped the “Advanced”, though being the direct … Continue reading Hit Points Through the Editions, part 3
I occasionally think of myself as a “Killer DM” – you’ll find it on my profile at RPG Geek, for instance. However, when you get down to it, I don’t kill that many player characters. The fact is, I’m far more interested in seeing how the story plays out, and it’s hard to have a story when everyone’s dead. Thus, upon hearing my players last … Continue reading The Total Party Kill I Remember Best
When 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons was released, it also gained a series of eight adventures that took a group of adventurers from levels 1 to 20. Starting with the Sunless Citadel and continuing through to Bastion of Broken Souls, it demonstrated something that previous editions hadn’t provided: a complete “Adventure Path” series that went the full range of levels. However, players only familiar with … Continue reading Musings on Adventure Path Structure
Well, this is interesting! Wizards of the Coast and OneBookShelf have enabled print-on-demand for a initial range of titles on the DMs Guild. This is fantastic news for people who want hard copies of those older products. However, it does come with a few caveats… The main thing to consider is that those products won’t be printed exactly like the original printing. A single softcover or … Continue reading Print-on-Demand versions of classic Dungeons & Dragons titles
I was recently asked if I had written reviews of the adventures set in the Eberron Campaign Setting. The answer is yes, I reviewed the original three adventures. This review was originally written in 2004; I’ve revised the original text to make it more applicable to today’s audience. Once upon a time, Wizards – and, before them, TSR – produced adventures on a regular basis … Continue reading D&D Adventure Review: Shadows of the Last War
