Month: February 2015

Homebrew Dice Rolling App

Riley John Gibbs1 Comment

After not feeling well the last couple of days and staying up last night thinking about what sorts of features I thought a good dice-rolling app should have, I decided today during my second consecutive sick day to build a web app with the features I wanted. I decided to give Bootstrap a try while I was at it too. It’s my first practical application of having purchased a domain name about a month back, beside just having a site to screw around on.

So it’s up on my as yet nearly empty website. The app looks decent on mobile too. Your feedback is solicited on any points that you fancy.Read More »

The Challenge of Providing an Appropriate Challenge

Riley John Gibbs2 Comments

It has come to my attention that my judgment around what constitutes a challenging series of encounters in Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons still requires refinement. It’s easy to frame the question a bit naively as such: “Given an average party level of X, and a monster challenge rating (CR) of Y, how many monsters can the PCs take on?” This is a good question to start with, but designing encounters needs to be about more than whether the PCs can theoretically survive that encounter, and the CRs of the monsters end up being only one piece of the puzzle.Read More »

The Perils of a Night’s Rest

Riley John Gibbs3 Comments

Last night, one of my D&D groups cracked open the outer door of a prison containing a demon that has been imprisoned for hundreds of years, with the intention of killing it once and for all. But about halfway through the dungeon, low on resources with one of the PCs having been inches from death, they’ve decided that they should probably retreat for now and come back the next day after recovering. They are aware that there is a danger that the demon could escape and either come after them or cause some other havoc.

But if the PCs do decide to turn back and return the following day, what should the demon do in the meantime?Read More »