‘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
Back in lockdown, I was able to DM and play in four or five games a week. Since term restarted, that has gone to pot rather. Being a DM can seem like a full-time job, and there will be weeks (like this one, in my case) where you just can’t find the time to prep. How do you get around that?
Wizards of the Coast Making your own homebrew campaign setting can be a daunting undertaking. World-building can be very time-consuming, and if you’re not really that interested in cartography, demographics, cosmologies, pantheons, and so forth, you might find yourself reaching for a someone else’s work. How should you go about using a published campaign setting? … Continue reading Using Published Campaign Settings
Of the three pillars of D&D, combat is the one most defined in the rules, and, for most groups, it’s going to take up a significant part of each session. D&D is a complex game, though, and, handled badly, combat has the chance to become repetitive, frustrating, or tedious. How, then, can we make combat as exciting and evocative as it should be?
The Tomb Raider games achieve a really nice balance between several different gameplay elements: exploration, puzzles, stealth, and, of course, combat. And these are all elements you can embrace in D&D!