Where it Lies Loosely inspired by Episode 114 of Critical Role. As a DM it’s tricky to determine if a player really rolled a cocked dice: where a pencil or piece or paper interfered with the proper roll and the side […] ↓ 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…
Randomised Monsters I haven’t exactly done this, because I always choose monsters based on the environment and story. I did “balance” an encounter based solely on the number of minis I had available. I just kept throwing gnolls at the […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Boom I’m not sure whether to feel proud about this dad joke or a little ashamed. Next I’ll be doing a “dice pool” joke with the gamers swimming laps. So-called “exploding” dice systems are fun. When you roll a certain […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Innocence of Youth Everyone thinks of little kids as cute and innocent, but they’re really not. That’s learned behaviour. We teach them morality and what is acceptable and unacceptable. If given a license to misbehave or act “immorally” in the […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Sadvantage Rolling d20s is a little like playing blackjack. Sometimes, deal after deal after deal, you’re sitting above 16. And other times you can pull five-card trick after five-card trick. Except that you can’t hit – let alone crit – […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Supernatural 1 “I’m not last in initiative, I’m first in initiative for the second turn.” There are advantage to going last. The battlefield has been established and the enemies have closed the gap between themselves and the party. You know […] ↓ 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…
Play it as it Lays The firm rule at my game table is that rolls don’t count on the floor. Otherwise there’s the temptation to strategically count good rolls wherever they are while rerolling bad rolls. But, man does it […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
When Dice Attack I once sat down to do the math on how many rolls would be needed for a proper distribution of rolls with a d20. And by “did the math” I meant “plump formulas into Excel until the […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
