The Negotiator Don’t let the fighter who used Charisma as their dump stat take the lead in talking to, well, anyone. Some fighter archetypes seem like they should be good at persuasion, such as knights trained in courtly etiquette, or […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Slippery When Wet Sometimes the most effective and deadliest hazards are the mundane, commonplace dangers we ignore even in our day-to-day lives: the balcony without a proper safety rail, the uneven staircase, the old ladder, and the slippery floor. Because […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
School for the Gifted Whenever we get to a locked door, one of the players at my table invariably asks this question, only half teasing. Because he knows the GM is the kind who will teasingly reply “the door doesn’t […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
You Shall Not Pass I showed this comic to my wife and she just sneered and said, “that wouldn’t stop most women; they’d just march right in. It’s boys that have the problem going into washrooms.” Oh well. I still […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Handheld GPS Players don’t keep maps anymore. Which might also be the result of dungeons seldom being larger than 3-6 encounter areas and generally fitting onto a single 8×11 page. You seldom spend three or four sessions in a single […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Alternate Solution It never fails for rogues. They search the floor. They search the doorway. They search the chest. Each time they get a super high number but find no traps. But the one time they roll a “3”, that […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Most Important Meal At high levels, heroes feast is just something you have every morning you’re expecting trouble. It’s expensive, but the benefits are solid, and by 12th level, you probably have tens of thousand gold pieces to spend on […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Tapped Potential Early in their careers, most adventurers end up venturing into a low level dungeon. Some place full of goblins and giant rats with small amounts of treasure that seems small to the greedy adventurers but would be a […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Impossible Lock We’ve all locked ourselves out of our house once or twice. It’s super annoying, but probably not nearly as annoying when your spare keys are stored at the lowest level of five different dungeons.
Mapping Skills I’ve only had one D&D game where a player was tasked with making a map and keeping track of the group’s position in the dungeon. This was in a very unconventional 4e game in early 2012 and it […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Gesundheit Verbal and somatic components – and the majority of material components – are pretty useless. They have no hard mechanical effect, but instead serve to differentiate magic beyond damage types. This way the firebolt dealing an average of 10 […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Tomb of Replacement Characters Reading through the generally excellent Tomb of Annihilation I noticed in the titular tomb there were a number of replacement Player Character options included. Trapped heroes or adventures turned to stone or just the survivors of a […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
