O sages standing in God’s holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. –W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” Okay, I’ll fess up – this isn’t a post about how to use […]
Spells This breakdown of spells is lengthy enough that I’m going to boil down trends first, rather than making readers wade through a discussion of literally every spell in Basic to read a derived change log. You might say it’s a trifle dry. (This blog is justly accused of same; […]
When last we left our intrepid blogger, I discussed Combat and Conditions in D&D Basic, focusing particularly on how the rules had changed between the playtest packet and the final. This time, it’s Part Three, the Rules of Magic. In June of last year, I wrote about the spells of […]
This is my fourth post reviewing the D&D Basic rules, including comparison to the last playtest packet. Previous posts have covered races and classes; personality, backgrounds, and equipment; and general rules and adventuring. Judging by the title of the post, I’m probably writing about combat and conditions this time. Like […]
In this, my third post comparing D&D Basic to the last of the playtest packets, we get into the fundamental rules of D&D. In the Basic PDF, it’s Part Two: Playing the Game, but either part of that would make for a misleading post title, and what kind of barbarian […]
This post continues the detailed comparison between the D&D Basic PDF and the last playtest packet that WotC issued (10-14-2013). Part One of this analysis focused on races and classes; this time, we’re getting into more terra incognita, including one of the most-discussed paragraphs in the whole blesséd thing. Without […]
On Thursday, 3 July, 2014, the tabletop gaming world was… not rocked to its core, perhaps, but the vast majority of conversation was turned to the release of D&D Starter and D&D Basic for the new edition (which, for want of any other term, we distinguish as 5e). The former […]
The other day, I got to talking with a friend about game-running, particularly in a setting for which the game-runner is not the initial creator. This includes LARPs, tabletop games, and for that matter, content development in video games – something most folks will never need to care about, but […]
This past weekend marked the thirteenth weekend-long event of Dust to Dust, so I want to talk about what goes into filling out an event’s schedule. Now, there are a ton of valid ways to approach this; the one that works for you is necessarily correct. I’m just talking about […]
A couple of weeks ago, I was contacted by +Oleg Crew from Hibercon Technologies to review their new D&D Dice Roller app. The hardest part of this process, other than finding some spare time, was figuring out how to use product keys in the iTunes store. Once I got that worked out, […]