How do you determine your character’s ability scores? According to the Player’s Handbook (page 12), the default is to generate them randomly. You roll four six-sided dice and record the total of the highest three, six times (‘4d6 drop lowest’). Other options are point buy (technically a variant rule) and taking the array: 15, 14, … Continue reading How to fix 4d6 drop lowest
Monte Cook Games Yesterday evening, my friends and I played a Cypher System one-shot. None of us had played the Cypher System (or Numenera) before, although all five of us have experience of roleplaying games generally. Two days previously, we had agreed to try a post-apocalyptic genre: dystopian London in the near future, with a … Continue reading Review: the Cypher System in Play
Monte Cook Games D&D 5th edition is a great game. It’s not perfect, and there are definitely problems with its mechanics that need fixing, but, for now, it’s my go-to RPG. If nothing else, it is comfortingly familiar, and the game your friends are most likely to know already. Over the next few weeks, though, … Continue reading New Year, New Game: the Cypher System
A setting-neutral holiday one-shot for four 4th-level characters. Yippee-ki-yay, motherflumphers. It is the night of the midwinter feast, and the party has been invited to the tower of archwizard Takagi for his annual celebrations. At dusk, a long, black stagecoach pulls up outside, drawn by four black horses. A stout halfling with dark, curly hair … Continue reading Die, Bard: A D&D Christmas Adventure Seed
‘At the end of the day, D&D is a game,’ a friend of mine said recently, ‘and some people just play it better than others.’ I’ve been giving this some thought of late. D&D is, of course, a game. It has rules. If you’re playing with a grid and minis, it also has a ‘board’ … Continue reading How to be a good D&D player
Dying in D&D is momentous. When you watch a character die before their time, that can be a surprisingly moving moment. And it’s important, therefore, that it’s handled properly.
Wizards of the Coast In this post, I am going to look at feedback surveys as a way of hearing from your players. They don’t need to be done frequently to provide a useful insight into how the game is going. D&D rests upon good relationships. People put a lot of themselves into this hobby: … Continue reading Player Surveys: Talking to the Team
A few months ago, following an interesting discussion on Reddit provoked by my post on creating awesome characters, I put the following question to Twitter: are roleplaying games an art form? In hindsight, it might have been better to ask, ‘can roleplaying games be an art form’. Perhaps the wording would have made a difference. … Continue reading Is D&D art?
Adventures in Middle-Earth is based on 5th edition D&D but makes a number of tweaks to the system to better incorporate the themes of Tolkien’s storytelling. This article will highlight some of the most innovative changes and consider how they might work well in other D&D games.
Wizards of the Coast In 5th edition, there are three main ways of determining your ability scores. One method is point buy, listed as a ‘variant’ in the Player’s Handbook. Another method – the simplest – is to take the array: 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8. But for many players, the default method, rolling, … Continue reading Rolling Stats