The original Baldur’s Gate computer game had a massive problem. The side content was more entertaining than the main quest! It’s a funny thing about designing open world games, which a lot of D&D is. It works fine as long as everything is side content – a smorgasbord of options that the players can choose. Which quest to go on? Which dungeon to brave? But … Continue reading Goals and Side Quests
We played our final session of Shadow of the Dragon Queen on Monday, August 28, 2023. The four characters had penetrated the heart of the Flying Citadel and needed to take it down before it could wreak havoc on Kalaman. Present for this session were the following characters: In their previous session, the party had retrieved the mirror of erised reflected paths and were now … Continue reading Shadow of the Dragon Queen, session 13
One of the interesting features about RPGs (well Dungeons & Dragons, but others as well), is that there are actions that sound fun, but quickly become extremely unfun when applied to the player characters. Things like stun, disarm, paralysis, and so on. Abilities that boil down to the player skipping one or more turns. I find this particularly interesting because it’s something mostly invisible to … Continue reading A Stunning Conundrum
Our first D&D session of 2024 took up the campaign when the last session left off: exploring the mysterious tower in the ruined city on the borders of Ket. Two factions were interested in the contents of the ruins: the refugees from the Plains of the Paynims, and a goblin force known as the Red Caps. The basic plan for the adventure came from the … Continue reading Adventures in Greyhawk: Under the Tower
We played our fifth session of Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk on Monday, October 9th, 2023. After our previous session, the group was now aware of where Cragmaw Castle was and were keen to find and explore the location where Gundren was meant to be held captive. I have a very inconsistent approach to random encounters these days. Typically, when there’s story-based adventuring to … Continue reading The Shattered Obelisk, session 5
We played the penultimate session of Shadow of the Dragon Queen on Monday, August 21, 2023. The characters had entered the Flying Citadel, and were making their way through the tunnels that combed its base, looking for a way to disable the blasted thing. Honestly, I’m pretty happy with most of this section. But the one thing that obviously no-one at Wizards considered is the … Continue reading Shadow of the Dragon Queen, session 12
We played our fourth session of The Shattered Obelisk on Monday, October 2, 2023. (Yes, I’m behind. I know, I know. Less behind than with Shadow of the Dragon Queen!). The heroes began the session talking with Sildar and Sister Garaele. Remember, in the last session, Sildar and Garaele had helped rescue most of the party from the Redbrands! It was time for me to … Continue reading Running The Shattered Obelisk, session 4
One of the detractions you occasionally hear lobbied against Dungeons & Dragons is that it doesn’t handle skills well. This is particularly in relation to social challenges, but I’ve seen it in other contexts. The more nuanced version of the complaint is that D&D is too binary: that its skills are purely pass/fail. It does not handle partial successes. These, much though I hate to … Continue reading Skills in Challenges
Our eleventh session of Shadow of the Dragon Queen took place on Monday, August 14, 2023. In our last session, the heroes had defeated Belephaion, the leader of the Dragon Army forces in the City of Lost Names and prevented his plans for the city. However, we weren’t quite done with Chapter 6; there was still a couple of events to go. Those events were … Continue reading Shadow of the Dragon Queen, session 11
Running an interesting wilderness travel session is hard. Part of that is because there are different reasons for that session. Do you just want to get from point A to B to continue the story? Or is there something in the wilderness you need to find? One of the odder random wilderness encounters in a published adventure was a multi-room monster lair. The problem? It … Continue reading Thinking about Wilderness Travel
