Over in that Twitter thread, we were talking about the function of totems as 4e magic items. I suggested that they could be intended for druids, especially the Circle of the Moon, and might boost the stats of lower-CR Wild Shapes, so that if shapeshifting to a wolf or panther is […]
Posting over in Twitter about 4e, I happened to recall that 4e genasi had a lot more varieties than 5e genasi do. Their metagame position is also quite different; 4e genasi have unique offensive powers, while 5e genasi have spells that might be offense or utility, and are substantially varied […]
I’ve been digging into Waterdeep: Dragon Heist like a whole lot of 5e fans right now. I think this book acknowledges and incorporates the Spellplague more than any other adventure we’ve seen so far, which is to say any – but I haven’t read every adventure and may have missed things. There’s […]
Over the course of the campaigns I’ve run, my PCs have faced a whole lot of cabals of evil spellcasters. One of those campaigns was an early run of the Dust to Dust setting, and the Blackfeather Order played an important role in both the tabletop game and the LARP. […]
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a game designer in possession of even a modest audience must be in want of a clever new way to talk about fundamental design.” — Jane Austen, on The Forge, circa 2003, probably. This is one of those abstract-theory posts that might be […]
When I first saw monster stat blocks in the D&D Next playtest, and again upon the release of the Monster Manual, I was surprised at how much of a return to 2e-and-earlier form they resembled. They have some of the formal action presentation of 4e’s creature blocks, but they’re much […]
Tabletop games, like video games, have long had a concept of a “boss fight,” a climactic end to an adventure or series of adventures. Starting from that similar position, though, video games have done far more creative things with the concept, while tabletop games have scarcely advanced beyond what MMO […]
In case you aren’t already reading it, I’m still writing a weekly column on Tribality.com exploring the history of D&D’s classes. Once I got to the end of the Druid, I took a vote on what I’d write next. It looked like the Paladin would score an easy win, but […]
In the first two posts of this series, I’ve discussed the history of the ranger class from OD&D to 2e, along with the peripheral additions that splatbooks added to it. Now that I have a little writing time again, I’m going to see if I can wrap up 3.x through […]
In a tabletop game, “traditional” mechanical traps are awkward to include in a dungeon, and that is a real shame. I commented briefly on the problem of traps in my post on module construction, but now I want to dig into that topic more deeply and propose a new solution […]
