Whenever a character moves or takes an action to do anything strenuous (including dash), the amount of time that can continue to hold their breath is reduced by 1 more round. This is in addition to the normal loss of breath from passage of time.
Optionally, if a character takes damage, they must make a Constitution save equal to 10 plus the damage taken or lose another round of breath. If they fail the save by 5 or more, they lose two rounds instead.Read More »
I painted some dragons recently. I was trying to set them up on my desk to look like they were fighting. But my red dragon looks like he’s reaching out and tenderly touching my shadow dragon’s breast.
As you might guess from the title, this post is about a couple of different ways in which a PC in D&D might fall a great distance and not care too much about it. In some cases, it’s just luck; but sometimes it’s an inescapable part of the system.Read More »
Last night marked a successful game night at the office, wherein four of us joined forces for two games of Sentinels of the Multiverse, my favorite comic book superhero themed card game. (There is at least one other that is decidedly not my favorite.) All three of my coworkers—two of them pictured, one hiding—were new to the game, so I once again had the pleasure of introducing friends to a game that I love.
My Sunday morning D&D campaign adopted some house rules a few weeks back, taken from the blog Protecting the Private Life. We didn’t adopt all of the rules in that post, but we did add levels exhaustion as a consequence of being knocked unconscious, and it has worked out well. But we’ve also boosted magical healing as our own concoction, which has proven even more successful.
We had a PC death yesterday morning. Long live Alphonse Saperstein III.
I wish to celebrate this particular death not because I wished for the character to die, but because it created a situation that elicited some quality drama from the players, and they played through it very well.Read More »
I had an idea for a magic item for D&D not too long ago. It works something like this:
Pick some number of dice to roll, and if none of them are a 1, then you gain hit points equal to the sum of the dice. But if even one die is a 1, then you instead lose hit points equal to the sum of the dice.
So of course, being a fellow with some background in mathematics and a penchant for giving myself problems to solve, I decided to figure out how many dice you should roll in order to maximize your expected value.
I’ve recently assumed once again the mantle of Dungeon Master for my Sunday morning D&D group. After two sessions with this campaign, it has become clear that this campaign may be too full of experimental elements. It is very uncertain to me that I will be able to call this a successful campaign, at least not for the first several weeks while I figure some things out.
I have so many thoughts on this that I’m going to break this up into multiple posts, the first of which is about the challenges of running this as a sandbox campaign.Read More »
I went to the beach yesterday afternoon—not the way I normally start posts on this blog—and while I was there, I did some thinking and subsequent writing in my notebook about world building. The first topic was diseases and plagues as conflicts in fantasy RPG settings like D&D, and how magical healing might change the nature of people’s relationships with them. Next, I considered how churches to evil deities might exist.Read More »
Earlier this month I traveled to Atlanta to visit family and to attend Dragoncon for the first time. I’ve been to other geek conventions before, like New York Comic Con, Connecticon, Anime Expo, and Strategicon, but this one was by a good margin the best experience I’ve had at a con to date.Read More »
No Free Parking Money 