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 »
Tag: dungeons and dragons
The High Cost of Living and Dying and Having an Angel Cast Raise Dead
On Sunday morning, one of my D&D groups assaulted a fortress full of ogres. It didn’t go so well, and one of them ended up dying, but I used an NPC ally of theirs to bring them back to life. I have some reservations about this all the way through.Read More »
The Perils of a Night’s Rest
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 »
Fifth Time’s a Charm
Wizards of the Coast recently released the Fifth Edition (5E) of Dungeons & Dragons. After years of playing Pathfinder, having been disappointed by 4th Edition, my friends and I have decided to try out Fifth, and I’m really pleased with what they’ve come up with.Read More »
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