Tag: dungeons and dragons

Magic Item Math

Riley John Gibbs2 Comments

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.

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A DM’s Experiments, Part I: Sandboxing

Riley John Gibbs5 Comments

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 »

Some Thoughts on Diseases and Evil Deities in Fantasy Settings

Riley John Gibbs3 Comments

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 »

A Rogue by Any Other Backstory Would Smell as Sweet

Riley John Gibbs1 Comment

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

Riley John Gibbs2 Comments

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 »