The second of the Unearthed Arcana series on expanding options available to characters is now out. Its topic? Bards! The two colleges included in the Player’s Handbook are both excellent and providing interesting variations on the basic topic. For me, it’s hard to top them – both represent character types that I enjoy playing. So, how do the new colleges stand up? College of Glamour … Continue reading Thoughts on Unearthed Arcana: Bardic Colleges
Barbarian primal paths have a problem, and that’s the Totem Warrior path. When one ability (the Bear Totem) is so good – gaining resistance to ALL damage except psychic – it’s hard to compete against that. With that in mind, here’s a few notes on the new Primal Paths that are spotlighted in playtest form in a recent Unearthed Arcana column. Path of the Ancestral … Continue reading Thoughts on the Unearthed Arcana Barbarian Primal Paths
Dungeons & Dragons is an amazing game. It’s one of the most enjoyable pastimes you can have and, especially for Dungeon Masters, can require varying amounts of your time: from just a couple of hours running a session, to many, many hours preparing, designing and planning your world and future adventures. These days, I typically use published adventures for most of my games. They allow … Continue reading Adventure Complexity and the New Dungeon Master
It’s a staple of fantasy adventures. The adventurers are in a crowded marketplace when they hear a scream, and they see goblins pouring from the sewers. They need to fight! At this point, what happen to the crowd? And how do you represent that in game? The standard answer for me and many other DMs is not great: we simply have the crowd mysteriously escape. … Continue reading Dungeon Master Tips: When Crowds are Attacked
As most of you are likely aware, Storm King’s Thunder¸ the latest adventure from Chris Perkins and Wizards of the Coast, is now available in stores. It’s an adventure for 1st-10th level characters which sees them facing off against a lot of giants. It is also, in a lot of ways, the companion to the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide. Your players have read that book? … Continue reading Adventure Structure and Design: Storm King’s Thunder
In the earliest days of Dungeons & Dragons, a stream of new and variant classes appeared in the pages of The Strategic Review¸ The Dragon and other fan magazines. One category of class was the NPC Class, a character class designed specifically for use by the DM’s non-player characters. Often, they would have various features that made them inappropriate for use by the players – … Continue reading 5E Supplement Review: Priestess
One of the great tropes in adventure fiction is capturing the protagonist and letting him find a way to escape. Unfortunately, requiring the capture of adventurers is extremely problematic in the middle of a game of Dungeons & Dragons. It is something that needs to be very carefully handled. The problem derives from the nature of D&D. The essence of the game is that you … Continue reading The Trouble with Capturing Adventurers
One of the most important skills in the Dungeon Master’s toolbox is the ability to improvise. And, based on my long experience with the game, it’s a skill that takes time to develop. Like most skills, you get better at improvisation by actually improvising, and paying attention to what your players think of the result. Many of the games I’ve run have been improvised. Even … Continue reading On the Art of Improvisation
It is with some surprise that I find that I’ve been running the Dungeons & Dragons organised play at Guf Ballarat for the past six years. It began slowly, but now we typically have somewhere between 20 and 40 people playing with us on a weekly basis, coming to one or other of the D&D nights we hold or, for some players, both. We get … Continue reading New Players and the Slow Release Schedule of Dungeons & Dragons
Designing a basic adventure for Dungeons & Dragons isn’t hard. Just draw a map, put some monsters and treasure in it, and you’ve got an adventure! It’s one of the reasons that D&D remains the most dominant role-playing game on the market: it isn’t hard to create an adventure for your players. However, just going into a dungeon and killing monsters proves – after a … Continue reading Designing Adventures: Objectives
