The primary goal of a published adventure should be to get the DM excited about running it. There are many, many adventures that don’t do that. Now, I hear you say, “What about being a good adventure?” Well, that should also happen, but more than anything, the DM and players will never find that out if the DM doesn’t want to run it. It starts … Continue reading Published Adventures – Their Goals
With the advent of the Christmas season, my groups splintered into Those Who Go on Holiday and Those Who Do Not. (Also, a special mention to my Monday group who found Christmas occurring on Monday, then New Year’s Day, then the birthday of a player’s wife…) So, in the spirit of holiday cheer for those still around and wanting a game, I ran a session … Continue reading Cyberpunk RED Session – Retrieve the Asset!
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
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
Making a good economy in any RPG is a challenging affair. Many players have noticed how the current edition of Dungeons & Dragons has trouble providing things for characters to spend gold on. So, what happens when you invent a new currency for an adventure that the players can spend on stuff? Well, what’s most likely to happen is that the designers don’t think through … Continue reading Economy is Hard: Soul Coins
Here’s my advice to anyone wanting the players to really bond with the other non-player characters (NPCs) in the setting. Keep them around. Keep them interacting with the heroes. But pay attention to which NPCs the players enjoy interacting with. Those are the ones you want to keep. The other side of it: You need to enjoy running the NPC! It’s no good doing something … Continue reading Keep Your Non-Player Characters Around
The game of Dungeons & Dragons runs on rules. Something I expect the designers of the game to do is respect those rules. In this case, from Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk, they did not. In the original version of this room in The Lost Mine of Phandelver, there are two bandits. The revision, which keeps adding monsters to make it a more challenging … Continue reading I hate “Just handwave it”
If you’re writing a D&D adventure, one of the things you’re probably not thinking about is “Are the characters using flying in this adventure”. Unless you’re doing an adventure for your home group, and you know they will be. Most of the times when you buy a published adventure, it also doesn’t consider “do the characters fly?” What effect does that have on the adventure? … Continue reading The Perils of Flying and Adventure Design
Over the many years I’ve played role-playing games, there are a few games that I have never really had the chance to sit down and play. Runequest, in the form of its 2nd edition (1979) was a game I played a couple of games of at school, and I have run a couple of sessions of it later in my life, but never to a … Continue reading Exploring the RuneQuest RPG
Wizards of the Coast have put out several big campaign adventures for D&D. And many of them left some DMs wondering “How the eff do I run that?” It’s important to note that this feeling is not confined to their products. It’s true of every adventure publisher, but people are most likely to have seen those big campaign adventures for D&D. I believe that some … Continue reading Adventures, Designer Assumptions, and GM Capabilities
