Sometime within the next month or two, I plan to start up a new campaign, now that my Mage chronicle of a year and a half has ended. There are a few other short-run games that we’ll play first, which means I have a bit more time to plan both […]
So hey, there’s a new D&D Next Playtest packet that arrived last night. Neat! According to the playtest summary, they’ve updated monsters and experience points, added a chapter on magic items, and updated the Caves of Chaos adventure. Obviously, I would have liked a new class update also, blah blah […]
Before all else in this post: I am not an Economics major. I am, moreover, aware that I am not an economics major. I do know a few things about games, though. (Commentary by actual economics majors is welcome, though.)I’ve been reading the Valve economics blog, and it got me […]
In the great majority of medieval fantasy games, the first or second choice a player makes when creating a character is that character’s race. Depending on the game, this choice may or may not make a large difference on a character’s mechanical outcome, but it is probably the biggest single […]
The next round of D&D Next playtest materials for public playtesters like me has dropped. I wanted to jot off a few thoughts as I skim through the files – it’ll be another couple of weeks before my gaming group can actually meet to play with any of this. They […]
A discussion in the comments of my previous post brought up the many different forms that multi-classing has taken over the years in D&D, so I thought I might explore that in a post. It’s also something that Kainenchen and I have talked about many times, because there are a […]
First read this – if we’re going to have a conversation, context is good. It’s an idea they’re currently testing internally about how the fighter class might work in 5e, and I’d like to discuss what I suspect are the origins of the idea, some strengths, and possibly some weaknesses […]
In gradually continuing to develop the Aurikesh setting, I’m working in no particular order – I’m just writing about ideas as they come to me. My focus is on defining and exploring the setting’s aesthetic. I am particularly interested in making it clearly different from the other two settings I […]
The armor chart of the D&D Next playtesting materials is odd, as many have commented, but I want to start this post by making it clear that I’ll be talking about 5e’s armor only in general terms, not in specifics. I get that it’s not a finalized design and nitpicking […]
I realize that relatively few readers are interested in Aurikesh, but I have fun writing about it. For this post, I will create a list of seven dungeons or dungeon-like locations in Aurikesh, all famous enough that players could start play knowing about them, though that doesn’t necessarily mean that […]