You’ve Got to Know How to Ask

This post is about a very thorny subject in gaming: what does it take to get information out of someone who doesn’t want to give it to you? I’ll be attempting to address this point within both LARPing and tabletop gaming, as I feel that the visceral immediacy of LARPing […]


D&D Next: Off the Cuff, Round 2 9

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 […]


Multi-classing, Or: “But Will It Blend?”

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 […]


D&D Next Fighters: Combat Superiority 7

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 […]


The New Death and others, by James Hutchings 1

Recently, James Hutchings of Teleleli and several other blogs contacted me with a request, probably common for bloggers of more note than I, but new to me: he asked that I review his anthology of poetry and short fiction, The New Death and others. I’m hardly alone here – there’s […]


Four Magic Items of Aurikesh 1

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 […]


Armor Issues in D&D 6

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 […]


Seven Dungeons of Aurikesh 2

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 […]


Mage Knight: Revenge Kickstarter

The company that I work for, MFV (née Icarus Studios), has begun a Kickstarter project so that we can create a video game of MageKnight. I am one of the designers on this project, and I am hugely, overwhelmingly excited about potentially getting to make this game. If you can […]


LARP Design: Between-Game Actions 12

In many live-action games, there exists a mechanic to represent the players’ actions between events, since otherwise players can only take part in the world and its goings-on for maybe twelve (for some games, as many as twenty-four) days out of every year. Since the plot committee is dedicated to […]