The Paizo team put out a blog entry recently about how they’re handling spells for Pathfinder II. I though I’d say a few words on what their approach means for the game. Caveat: I’m not a fan of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. This will come out in this article. I think that if you enjoy Pathfinder, you’re an excellent person who should keep playing games … Continue reading Thoughts on Pathfinder Playtest Spells
When I was at university – so many years ago – a game was released based on the works of Roger Zelazny. Called Amber Diceless Roleplaying, it cast the player characters as the sons and daughters of an immortal, immensely powerful family, who were basically gods. The interesting thing about the game was that the characters didn’t like each other that much. The game was … Continue reading Things I learnt from Amber Diceless Roleplaying
I’ve run Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat three times each, Curse of Strahd twice, Out of the Abyss and Princes of the Apocalypse once each, and I am currently running Storm King’s Thunder and Tomb of Annihilation. By now, I’ve had a lot of experience running the campaign adventures of Wizards of the Coast. Many people evaluate adventures based on how … Continue reading The Structure of Campaign Adventures
In Out of the Feywild (see review in the last post), there’s an encounter with an invisible pixie. The encounter says it trails the PCs invisibly unless they seem friendly. What then makes the pixie interact with the PCs? It’s a problem I’ve seen many times in adventures. The designer needs to set up a situation where the PCs have something to react to. The … Continue reading Adventure Design: A Word on Encounter Triggers
Over the years, Dungeons & Dragons adventures have tried many different techniques of presenting monster stats in the adventure. The first adventures – Steading of the Hill Giant Chief – listed the hit points of the monsters and then expected you to look them up in the Monster Manual. Later AD&D products provided “full” stat-blocks, although they’d typically leave out special ability descriptions. However, as … Continue reading Presenting Monster Stat-Blocks in Published Adventures
Veluna is a good-aligned theocracy in the World of Greyhawk, and the setting of my current Greyhawk campaign. It wasn’t originally, but it’s where the adventurers have ended up. As a result, it behoves me to have a look at the country, and see what adventures it inspires. I use two main sources for information on Veluna: the 1983 World of Greyhawk boxed set and … Continue reading Greyhawk: A Look at Veluna
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
One of the more fascinating mechanics of the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons is the concentration mechanic. For those not familiar with the mechanic, it creates a limitation on how many spell effects can be used at once. Each caster may only concentrate on one spell with a duration of concentration; thus, there is no way that a caster could maintain both a fly … Continue reading When Concentration Fails
When you design a dungeon, do you put in rooms with no monsters or traps? I do. Apart from anything else, they provide space that prevent every monster in the dungeon learning that there are adventurers present and converging on them for one mass battle. That’s amusing. But only once. However, an empty room shouldn’t be entirely empty. Each “empty” room is the opportunity to … Continue reading Designing Dungeons: Empty Rooms
It’s Friday night, and I’m at home not playing an RPG. This feels odd. The reason I’m not playing an RPG is that the hosts of our Friday Night RPG sessions, Martin and Peggy, have wandered off to another part of Australia. Typically, we alternate weeks between two RPGs. I DM my 5E D&D Greyhawk game one week, and Martin DM’s another RPG the other … Continue reading Thoughts on Campaign Structure
