Dungeons & Dragons
I wanted to summarize my thoughts on how magic is handled in Dungeons & Dragons and see if there are other people who feel the same. Although the rules for D&D have changed from Original to 5th Edtion the general approach to magic has stayed the same. There is one, Read more
The Ease of Making Your Own Campaign Setting I wanted to address a misunderstanding I see among people running fantasy roleplaying games. Many people, especially people new to game mastering, have this idea that creating their own world for the games they want to run is difficult. They look at Read more
One distinction for roleplaying games I don’t hear discussed is toolbox games vs. focused games. There is so little discussion that I had to invent the terms to discuss them with my friends. Most games are focused games. They have one setting detailed in the rule book where the game’s Read more
Problems with Alignment & Mystic Destiny There’s no way to be in fantasy roleplaying and avoid discussions of alignment. Some fans are fascinated by matching popular characters from fiction up with the nine alignments that first showed up in the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons but others (me included) Read more
Like many fans of fantasy roleplaying I’ve been hearing about Wizards of the Coast’s latest controversy (will they ever run out of them?). In the ramp up for the release of Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes for D&D 5th edition they’ve announced sex changing elves to stand in solidarity with the Read more
In recent years there has been a lot of talk of mixing heavy metal music (or the heavy metal ambiance) with Dungeons & Dragons. James Edward Raggi, founder of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, has said in interviews that mixing the two was his goal with his RPG company. People Read more
Alexander Macris wrote “Every campaign is a law unto itself”. This isn’t a gamer version of “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”. It means that every RPG campaign should establish its own setting, house rules and style. Lethality is one of the knobs you fiddle with when setting up Read more
Fantasy roleplaying has a tradition of being executed by a party of adventurers whose skills complement each other. Warriors use traditional weapons and armor to handle physical threats, wizards use spells to either give the party an advantage or deal with arcane threats, roguish types sneak into places and disarm Read more
In this post I hope to bring attention to a topic that is poorly understood by many RPG fans yet important to our games. Whether intentional or not most people in a roleplaying session are trying to adhere to a set of guidelines that will bring about a desired direction Read more
I was going to title this post How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the OSR but before posting I checked to see if the title was taken. Jesse Goldshear beat me to it with a thoughtful post that expresses points in line with mine. I’m certainly not the Read more