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 »
Tag: fifth edition
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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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 »
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 »
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 »
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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