Far over the Misty Mountains cold To dungeons deep and caverns old We must away ere break of day, To seek the pale enchanted gold. —The Hobbit On one hand, talking about the Ranger class in this blog has had me reading the Exploration rules. On the other, I’ve been […]
We just finished a pretty important side-quest in my D&D campaign and the session went really well, so I want to talk about some of the things that I did to prepare for it and how it all worked out. Special thanks go to Stands-in-Fire, who normally plays in this […]
The new playtest packet for the Mystic class – known in other editions as the Psionicist – went up on the Wizards of the Coast website today in Unearthed Arcana. Since I’m also working on an edition-by-edition exploration of psionics over in Tribality right now, I’m primed to be excited […]
Okay, I’m a month late to the game on this one, but I’ve only now found time to write about the most recent release from Unearthed Arcana: Waterborne Adventures. It’s a rules module for things that like water, but prefer to stay above it rather than in it. In particular, […]
I love that the new Unearthed Arcana column on the Wizards website offers public-playtest versions of future material for D&D. This week, there are rules for mass combat – always one of the sticky design areas for tabletop games intended for focus on individuals. In part to make sure I understand […]
The D&D 5e Monster Manual has been out for awhile now, and it is 95% goddamn amazing. I want to get that out of the way, because this is a discussion of one of its problem areas. Seriously, though, it has a great variety of monsters, excellent artwork, a reasonable level […]
For my Aurikesh campaign setting, I scrapped the core 5e races and wrote new racial abilities. I am pretty much fine with 5e’s rules for elves, dwarves, halflings, and the less common races, but they weren’t what I wanted for Aurikesh. As I’ve mentioned before, I really don’t like the […]
So I have this ongoing difference of opinion with Kainenchen over the ranger class, as a shorthand for the whole system of having more than four classes. Does D&D need more classes than cleric, fighter, rogue, and wizard? Can all other important class concepts be represented by some multi-class combination […]
Spells This breakdown of spells is lengthy enough that I’m going to boil down trends first, rather than making readers wade through a discussion of literally every spell in Basic to read a derived change log. You might say it’s a trifle dry. (This blog is justly accused of same; […]
Quite some time back, I talked about the problems of high-level gameplay in D&D and made an assertion that the concepts weren’t the problem, and that it was easy to scale up to higher fantasy and power on the story front. This assertion was not supported in the comments. It comes […]
