You can play an entire Dungeons & Dragons campaign and enjoy yourself thoroughly without giving a thought as to your character’s past history. Likewise, you can find creating a detailed history enhances your enjoyment. Which one works is affected by the preferences of you and your group. It is well worth discussing how you wish to approach character backstories at the beginning of the campaign. … Continue reading Character Histories and the Campaign
One of my worst experiences running Pathfinder came when we were playing the Council of Thieves adventure path. The adventurers enter a pocket dimension and have to fight their way out. Except that almost all foes have damage reduction 5; that is, they take 5 less damage unless struck by special weapons (I forget which type, likely silver or cold iron). The party didn’t have … Continue reading Foreshadowing, Research, and Retreating
Candlekeep Mysteries is out! Hooray! While you could use all the adventures in the book in a campaign that you link together, I am not sure that you would want to. Each adventure is about a (magical) book and a mystery connected to that book. It really depends on your group, but I would likely use no more than one or two of the adventures … Continue reading Prepping A Candlekeep Mystery (Extradimensional Spaces)
I recently finished running my players through some of Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, which I had used as part of our campaign quest to find the Rod of Seven Parts. In the early days of Dungeons & Dragons, the designers expected the players to create a map of their explorations. (The DM could gain much humour by comparing the player map to their own). … Continue reading Empty Rooms, Mapping, and Pacing
In general, the most disruptive event you could have in a Dungeons & Dragons game is the Total Party Kill (TPK). That event where every member of the party dies. One player character dying is a tragedy, but the campaign continues. However, if everyone dies, then it stops all the ongoing stories of the characters and could derail the campaign completely. The possibility of a … Continue reading On Total Party Kills
I am extremely bad at this. In the beginning, Dungeons & Dragons had a definite structure for how you handled dungeon exploration. It went something like this: Exploration is broken into ten-minute turns On the party’s turn, they can perform one of these activities: Move up to their speed – assumed to be slowly and while mapping, so 120 feet per 10 minutes was fast! … Continue reading Structured Dungeoneering
The original presentation of deities in Dungeons & Dragons is unusual. It was a short description of their combat abilities and not much more. And the book instructed you not to use them in combat, which was odd. Justin Alexander recently talked a little about it in his blog, The Alexandrian. Later games, especially Runequest, paid a lot more attention to the deities and their … Continue reading Using Deities in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign
“Next time for sure!” One of the aspects of the Dungeons & Dragons rules that is somewhat missing is a discussion of whether or not you can reroll an ability (skill) check. This is something that various editions of D&D have treated differently. In first edition, the rule was generally no. In third edition, it was generally yes – with a few exceptions. So, which … Continue reading Skill and Ability Checks: Can You Reroll?
On my birthday, we began a new campaign. The adventure? Curse of Strahd. It is the third time I have run the adventure. As I have expressed on Twitter, I delight in adventures that I run more than once – the experience of a role-playing game is something that changes whenever you get a new group. Different things are explored and emphasised. My conception of … Continue reading Another Visit to Curse of Strahd
As a follow-up to my post about the Plotless Campaign, consider running the first chapter of Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden in such a manner. In this structure, the characters are wandering adventurers, start each adventure walking into a new town, quickly discovering it has a problem, and solving it. What is different about this from the standard Rime? You ignore the rationale about … Continue reading The Rime with No Name
