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
Dungeons & Dragons 5E reduced the number of conditions in the game significantly. Pathfinder 2 did not. What this allows the game to do is more varied in the effects that spells, attacks, poisons, curses, diseases, potions, and other phenomena have. However, it also puts on a fairly hefty burden on players and GM to keep track of everything. Honestly, I’m not sure how easy … Continue reading Pathfinder 2 Condition Chaos
Dungeons & Dragons has some of the weirdest, most inconsistent approaches to how it defines its new editions. There are very few games that have changed that much over the years, but the number of changes aren’t quite reflected in the edition numbering. It doesn’t help that there were two different strands of D&D for a decade. Changes in the game have been big and … Continue reading What makes a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons?
I ran my second session of Pathfinder’s The Abomination Vaults the other night. It went well, as these things go. Not brilliantly, but we finished exploring the first level of the dungeon. I’d reviewed the rules around combat before the session, and was pleased to see that I still remembered most of them. The main things I had to remember this time were the rules … Continue reading More Grumpy Pathfinder
I feel I’m becoming a grumpy, middle-aged man. “Becoming?” someone mutters in a corner. “You’ve been that for a while now.” There are a lot of games I bounce off rather hard, but there are some that I think I should like a lot more than I do. And so, I keep trying to play them, even though it might not be the best idea. … Continue reading A Grumpy GM and a Giant Scorpion
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
In the forty-odd years, I’ve played Dungeons & Dragons, most of the magic items I give out come from the core rulebooks. There are several reasons for this, mainly because I often use random magic item tables rather than selecting items to match the characters. The random tables typically only exist in the core book. And it becomes very hard when the magic items are … Continue reading Supplement Review: Vault of Magic
I dread hearing as a DM that one of the players is going to go off on their own and try something. This isn’t because it’s hard to run their actions – this will rarely be the case. But it’s because it suddenly turns the game from a group endeavour into something where we’ve got players waiting around for others to finish what they’re doing. … Continue reading Going it alone
Area 1. Entrance Chamber (30 ft. square) Stone steps lead down from the ruins above to this chamber. An iron door, scratched and dented, stands in the middle of the opposite wall. The floor is likewise scratched and scored, and dried blood covers a lot of it. In the corners of the room, broken crossbow bolts and bits of metal rust away. The gnomes and … Continue reading Dungeon 23: Area 1 – Entrance Chamber
