RPG MUSINGS Play The Game You Want To Play
Category “Rules”
A Different Sort of Background Bonus
The background bonuses introduced in the PHB2 are one of the best things about what is arguably one of the best D&D4e books. I have always endorsed the idea that players should get some kind of reward, even if only a small one for having a character background. Even if a player doesn’t expand or [...]
Lost Skills: Perform
I’m an old dog: it’s hard to teach me new tricks. For example, take a recent 4e character I made. Lute playing is a huge part of my character concept, and I instinctively wanted to quantify his lute-playing expertise as a stat. But it turns out there’s no spot on the character sheet for musical [...]
Opportunity Actions: Races of Athas – Shadar-Kai and Warforged
Looking through some Dark Sun materials this week, I was surprised to hear people say, “So, which races will you allow?” I pitched this idea over at Wizards, and they told me that someone was already working on it. Everyone’s free to wait until that article publishes, or read it here, sooner. WOTC’s loss is everyone’s [...]
Meta-Gaming the House Blend
I was sitting here this morning, drinking a cup of coffee and editing a page of campaign information on Obsidian Portal, when I realized that this particular page might make a good post for the blog. A quick check of the schedule tells me that today is open to posting, so I thought I would [...]
DM’s Conundrum: Stun and Dominate
On Tuesday the 12th of July, 2010, I took part in a very interesting conversation on twitter. It was started when @AlioTheFool made a comment about players not liking certain conditions. What followed was an hour-long tweet discussion of the topic of what it means to win and how conditions may affect that in 4e [...]
Opportunity Actions: Tarrasque Workshop #1 – How Big is the Tarrasque?
So, this came up on Twitter: with the release of the Orcus miniature, and Monster Manual 3′s Allabar, Opener of the Way, what is the actual size of the Tarrasque? Seems like a simple question, but the answer, as always, is so much more. Frighteningly enough, I think this discussion is leading me to [...]
Hero Up!
There was a Twitter conversation this morning regarding Paragon fights taking significantly longer than Heroic ones. While obviously the sheer number of choices is an issue, that’s a built-in for the game, so we have to accept it and deal with it. Besides telling your players to hurry up, I had an idea a few [...]
RPGBN