Against the Odds If a session ever went 100% how I expected and completely according to both my plan and the players, I think my brain would cease to function. The infinite improbability required for things to go that smoothly […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
All Part of the Plan As a Dungeon Master, your plans seldom go as expected. The players *always* do the unexpected. However, most of the time, their actions are relatively expected, and not so completely out of the blue that […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Feed the Beast There’s lots of options for managing the locations of player characters. I like minis and battlemaps, but you can also use minis or tokens on index cards representing locations. There’s also cardboard pawns or papercraft minis. Candy […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Dance Like No One is Watching When your dice are on fire, you celebrate. Party while you can. Because your dice will turn on you soon enough, and try their best to horribly kill your character. Don’t eff me, […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
White Gloves A semi-autobiographical strip today. I recently picked-up the collector’s edition of Volo’s Guide to Monsters which is cool and shiny – in both a figurative and literal sense – but I’m terrified to use it. I paid $60 […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Hasta La Next Round I mock but it’s really not too hard for a DM to swap in reaction to a better witty response. As retcons go, that’s super easy and doesn’t really affect play much. Unless the remark is […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Party vs Party At the time of writing I’m planning a mini-campaign of Madness at Gardmore Abbey, converting the 4th Edition adventure to 5th Edition. Which, so far, has been pretty darn easy. The encounters copy over fairly well, all […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Balancing the Books There is a budget for an adventuring day: an expected number of encounters and a challenge for each encounter, with a projected amount of experience that can be earned between long rests. Of course, a Dungeon Master […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Triacontahedron Time They do make d30s, which are typically a rhombic triacontahedron for you geometry buffs. So that’s always an option. This strip comes from a line spoken by Perram (aka Jefferson Jay Thacker), a host of the excellent Know Direction […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
A Punchy Concept I love 3rd Party gaming products. I also hate 3PP. Good ones are a blessing on my game, while poor ones make me hate life itself. And it’s often hard to tell which are which. Wizards of […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Pisa Has Nothing On It Sometimes you just need to do something with your hands at the game table. Something to keep busy while the focus of the adventure is on another player or your character is so stunlocked they’ll […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Rolling Insight I think half the reason gamemasters have a screen is so they can hide their face while anticipating a building climax or looming twist. It can be hard not to subtly guide observant players down the right path […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
