Dress For Success I wonder how many NPCs want to be adventurers and try to learn class skills. The gap between commoner and classed characters is pretty huge, so you’d think everyone would want to make that leap, increasing the […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Uneven Odds The “take 20” rule in 3rd Edition worked but was awkward. Unless there was a time limit, there was no reason not to spend 2 minutes completely checking every inch of every 5-cubic-feet of a room. Or spend […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Dark Background As a DM it’s important to give your villains realistic and interesting origins. But unless the players know this backstory, they have precious little impact on the campaign. Conveying this information is the tricky part. Very often it’s […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Hot Stuff Coming Through Another strip pulled directly from my home game. Is lava rock to be made muddier? Mud to be turned rockier? Does it become fast moving boiling mud or steaming red-hot stone? So many questions and so […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Rock Fell, Nobody Died There is the tension when you have a semi-consumable magical item that can solve your problems at hand, but it has limited charges and might go away if you use the last one. You have to […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Crouching Peg, Hidden Hole D&D and similar RPGs are games are a weird mash-up of cultures and troped. knights from the Middle Ages, allied with Norse demihumans and Arthurian wizards fight monsters from Germanic folklore and Greco-Roman mythology. Then you […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Breath Weapon “What time is it? 9:30? Crud. I need to be asleep in 45 minutes and I’m already close to crashing. And I haven’t done the comic yet! “Man, I don’t want to put up the comic late again. […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Summoning Cycle Summoning a fiendish creature, such as a demon or devil, is a trope of fantasy fiction. Of fiction really, with the story of Faust being ages old. This has always been an awkward fit with the D&D rules […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Everyone Has a Story Backstory has often been a part of character creation, but 5th Edition codified the idea of “backgrounds”: what adventurers were before they were adventurers, how they were raised and what their life was like. It’s nice […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Swarm Funding I think 90% of my time on Kickstarter is spent backing RPG projects. I’ve backed a few video games and board games, but I always come back to fancy RPG products. Thankfully, I have a very high success […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Engage the Senses I should have some comment or musings here about how a good Dungeon Master engages all the senses with the descriptions: describing not just what players see but what they hear and smell. But I can’t, because […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
