As most of you know, in 4e D&D there is a material called residuum, essentially the same as the various arcane dusts that enchanters create by disenchanting magic items in World of Warcraft. A variant form of residuum shows up in the Vox Machina campaign (Exandra shows a lot of […]
This post comes out of a request from Patreon backer Benjamin Ybarra. Many thanks to everyone who contributed questions! If you like this kind of quick-hit content, all you have to do is send me more questions, by whatever means seems best to you. Tomas Giminez (@TGiminezDM) asks: Which is […]
This is the story of how, a couple of weeks ago, I had an idea eight years too late for the problem it solves. There’s a lot of development history to go into this, though, so bear with me and I’ll get to it – or you can skip straight […]
This post comes out of countless conversations with Kainenchen about Flight Rising and other, similar games with active economies. I’ve written about trying to build functional game economies for LARPs before, and though that post is somewhat dated now, it’s still a foundation for this one. The point of this […]
Over in Google Plusville, +Levi Kornelsen mentioned the absence of a magic item economy in 5e. This is a core design assumption on WotC’s part, and they haven’t been shy about it. In most settings I agree with this choice, but in his post he’s specifically talking about Eberron. That setting gets to […]
For those who know me, or have been reading this blog since its inception, it comes as no surprise that I’m less than satisfied with the crafting rules of 5e. The good side of them is that even magic items don’t cost XP (because charging XP turns it into something […]
I haven’t done much of anything new in D&D Next home-brewing for a long time, but this Thursday I’ll be reviving my Aurikesh campaign, which has been dormant since January. I remain very glad that the campaign doesn’t rely on having the same set of characters from one session to […]
There are a lot of lessons of good game-running that carry over between tabletop and live-action gaming. This post, though, concerns itself with an area in which the two are quite different. As usual, I’m talking about a certain band of LARPing, not all LARPing. (There are almost no statements that […]
It’s been a month and more since Mearls posted When Adventurers Aren’t Adventuring, in which he explains that D&D Next will offer rules for things that happen while the heroes are at home or otherwise off-duty from heroics and/or treasure-hunting. I think it’s fair to say that this has been […]
In the few weeks since my last post, I’ve been working off and on to put together a skill challenge that would also work as a crafting system for Alchemy in my campaign. The system that I’ve put together still has some kinks to get worked out – which is […]
