D&D Next: Off the Cuff, Round 5

The new D&D Next playtest packet came out today, and it’s as dense with changes as any packet we’ve yet seen. Only races have gone mostly unchanged, I think. I am surprised by a lot of these changes, and the early summary is that I hope most of these changes are experiments […]

Iron Kingdoms: Player-Side Review 4

A few weeks ago, one of the guys in my gaming group ran two separate one-shot sessions of Iron Kingdoms, in preparation for a longer-term campaign that he’ll soon be starting up. My schedule, particularly preparations for Kainenchen promising to put up with me for the rest of her life, […]

Random Determination in Gaming

This post by Ethan Skemp, and this comic by Randall Munroe, both comment on how humans process randomness, with a slant toward two different types of games. Through our unstoppable powers of pattern recognition, we are excellent at constructing narratives out of events that are either seemingly or literally random. […]

New Warlock Invocations for D&D Next

In my Aurikesh campaign, I have players using the Sorcerer and Warlock classes released in the 10-8-12 playtest packet. These classes were cut from the more recent packets, and enough of the other rules were rearranged to make it difficult to play these classes alongside up-to-date versions of the others, […]

Alignment 4

A few weeks ago, Wizards of the Coast released the Monk for the D&D Next Public Playtest. In that version, Monks had to belong to the Lawful alignment. I found this strange and objectionable, for a couple of reasons, and that has led to this post, which is about alignment […]

The Lore Game: Basics 3

In LARPing, there is a playstyle (not exactly a character archetype) defined by deep engagement with the setting lore and ardent pursuit of its mysteries. This area of gameplay is of particular interest to me; my first long-term character, in Shattered Isles, was a dedicated scholar, and the enjoyment I […]

A Second Year of Blogging

On November 19, 2010, I created this blog and posted about the games I was running and playing. Last year on this date, I posted again, with a quite different list of games. Since then, well, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose… Games I’m Running Dust to Dust: […]

Skill Challenges: Design in Progress 4

In a recent post on rogues, I discussed some of the issues surrounding 4e’s implementation of skill challenges. I’ve had a few days to give it more thought, and the idea has expanded in my imagination into something I might try to publish as a PDF, someday when I have […]

Guest Post in Dice Monkey

I wrote a guest post for Dice Monkey’s “Winter is Coming II” blog carnival, found here. Enjoy!Also, the first post in the blog carnival, The Ice Shall Take Us, is fucking amazing and you should all read it. No, seriously. This is a valid answer to the age-old question: “What […]

D&D Next: Rogues and Skills 5

There are a whole lot of interesting issues circulating around fighters and rogues in the new playtest packet. Back in this post I scratched the surface of the changes they’ve made to rogues, but just today I started to realize how deep those changes actually run. For my Aurikesh campaign […]