I’m in Chicago this week visiting my wife’s sister and her family, which includes a three-year-old and a one-month-old. The latter won’t get too much attention on this post; she’s still working on turning over from her belly to her back. But the older kid has lots of toys, puzzles, and games, of very different varieties—from each other and from my normal fare—which she views with a very different perspective from my own.Read More »
Author: Riley John Gibbs
Socially functioning geek.
A Proposed Taxonomy of Games
I have this taxonomic model of games that I’ve thrown about for a few years now, mostly in conversation with friends when I really get into heavy game talk. The model has four domains: Strategy, Skill, Social, and Chance.Read More »
On the Value of Obvious Choices
A couple weeks ago, playing as a PC again in my friend Erik’s Underdark campaign, my party came across three thralls kept by a mind flayer. One of them turned out to be my character’s brother, so while one might normally think very carefully before trying to separate a mind flayer from his possessions, the choice here was obvious.Read More »
Behind My Screen, or: Good Luck Finding Meaning in My Scribbles
I’ve been interested for a while in sharing a bit of my process for when I plan D&D sessions with my friends. I often comment half-seriously that I make most of it up as I go, and I’d still say that’s mostly true, and now maybe you’ll see what I mean. I therefore present humbly some samples of my prep notes below:Read More »
Keep Calm and Ad Hoc On
While perusing the Wizards of the Coast D&D forums, I came across a thread titled, “Need help for devising system for adjusting monsters.” Something about that title made me cringe and sneer. I had to take a second to think about why, and it didn’t take long for me to come to a conclusion.Read More »
A Rogue by Any Other Backstory Would Smell as Sweet
As happens from time to time, as I alternate between running Dungeons & Dragons games as the Dungeon Master and experiencing the story as a player, I have lately been itching to switch sides. After DMing two campaigns simultaneously for a few months, I want to get back behind the controls of a PC. I find myself dreaming up way that my character might get herself into trouble and back out again. But this musing scarcely escapes fantasy (in more ways than the obvious), even once I’ve returned with her to the table, because though I might have this image or concept of my character, they are only revealed or explored through the situations she ends up in, over which I have little control.Read More »
In Short, I Shortchanged Them
One of my D&D groups fought some zombies this morning. Fifth Edition zombies have a neat little mechanic that I’ve not seen before, in which they have a chance of not being destroyed despite being brought down to zero hit points. My players were fighting a handful of these guys, and the zombies were rolling really well (by which I mean I was rolling really well) on these saves, and several of them were absolutely refusing to go down. I started thinking that this might be frustrating my players, not knowing at all what was going on here as zombies stayed up, blow after blow. So I took a pause and explained to them the mechanic that was going on. Maybe that wasn’t the right choice.Read More »
Secrets, Secrets are so Fun. Secrets are for Everyone. (Not Just for Werewolves.)
Last night we played Ultimate Werewolf at my good friend Zack’s birthday party. That’s not much in the way of news; it has been our default party game whenever there are more than ten people gathered. But last night I decided to try something new as moderator.Read More »
Homebrew Dice Rolling App
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
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 »
No Free Parking Money 