I’ve been thinking about games that are not explicitly competitive but in which each player has their own victory metric. In other words, games that are not zero-sum but in which victory is not necessarily shared.
Read More »Tag: dungeons and dragons
Dungeons & Dragons-ish on My Last Day of Work
On my last day of work at Sure, the insurance tech company I’ve worked at for the last year and change, I ran a very impromptu game of Dungeons & Dragons for some people on my team. And by “impromptu,” I mean I had literally nothing prepared save for an idea of how to design a set of rules simple enough to be explained in under ten minutes and some character builds based on those rules. I got that together in roughly thirty minutes before we were scheduled to play.
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Supercharging Gaming
I just played a session of Dungeons & Dragons in person with two of my best friends for the first time in nearly two years, and it’s as if all of my burdens have suddenly become a lot lighter.
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Drinking & Dragons: A Critical Self-Review
Last night was the second installment of Nerd Nite LA‘s Drinking & Dragons, a combination of D&D and improv show, with Yours Truly as the Dungeon Master and players selected at random from the audience. When Katie, one of my co-bosses of Nerd Nite LA, asked me how I was feeling before the show, my most honest answer was, as usual, incredibly nervous. Then, around ten o’clock last night after the show concluded, I felt… still nervous?Read More »
Creative Endeavors of Goblins and Orcs
In Dungeons & Dragons, I find we too often neglect to create a distinctive culture for orcs, goblins, and other savage humanoids. It usually satisfies the players and DM to say merely that they are filthy, violent, and unsophisticated. This lack of culture and refinement stands in for any description of the ways in which their cultures express themselves.Read More »
Another Successful Introduction to D&D
I think it was about three years ago that my friend Jordan, until recently also my coworker, played one or two sessions of D&D with me after work at the office. And it was a few months ago that she told me her boyfriend Iain wanted to try it out, and asked me to run a game for them. Of course, I said I would. On Saturday evening, we followed through on that agreement.Read More »
Zack’s Maiden Dungeon Master Voyage
One of my favorite parts of D&D, and of gaming in general, is teaching my friends. Saturday night, Erik and I got to help Zack workshop his first D&D adventure as a Dungeon Master.Read More »
Schadenfreude in the Stocks
“I try to break out of the stocks.” He had been waiting all session for combat, trying to pick fights with anyone who threw him shade, and here he was watching combat helplessly from the stocks.Read More »
D&D House Rules: Healing
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.
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The cold calculations of cutting your losses
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 »
No Free Parking Money 