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“Why” and How It Can Improve Your Game
Willful suspension of disbelief is a concept that comes up a lot when talking about fiction. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it’s the idea that you sometimes have to stop your mind from saying “That’s ridiculous”, “That could never happen”, or “That is totally not real” in order to enjoy something. It boils [...]
Kristmas Kobold Adventure (feat. Krampus)
Every year I have a holiday tradition. I invite a few friends over, make pancakes, and have a Kristmas Kobold 1-shot. I suppose it’s a sort of (sometimes dreaded) holiday-themed adventure, but the cheese factor is cranked to 11 by the fact that the PCs are all kobolds, a fact which has never failed to [...]
D&D: It hurts so good
A couple weeks ago I wrote up a bit about how I was doing D&D wrong, but I didn’t feel like I was wrong to do it. Happily, that garnered quite a bit of discussion, more specifically on Twitter (where you can find me faffing about all day anyway) about what makes D&D “feel” wrong. [...]
D&D Discussion: Are you doing it wrong?
I used to post these updates over on my own site (www.vanitygames.com), which started out as a totally D&D DM blog-centric site. I was attempting to support my spouse, who had some vague aspirations towards game design, so I got into D&D so my spouse’d have a cheerleader on the sidelines. Well, that totally fell [...]
Kill the cleric!
Alternately titled: “Turning player loss into dramatic character death” but that sounds way less catchy. The setup: I have a player for whom we coined the term “D&Dmo.” When he was present at the table, and I mean present and not just sitting there, he was fantastic. Bright, beautiful, an engaging roleplayer, a great tactician, a [...]
More To Stealth Than Silence or Shadows
Whether you’re playing an epic high fantasy game, a gritty cyberpunk campaign, or a spooky horror game, chances are that characters are going to have to move around at some point or another with a great deal of stealth. They may have to sneak into a place, sneak around while in a place, sneak out, [...]
The Recycle Bin – Angel Beats and Speaking Well As The Dead
So it’s been a while. I would like to say I’ve been deep in a secluded underground vault, surrounded by nothing but my beloved Pez dispensers, exposing myself to as much media as I could to transmutate into Recycle Bin posts for you all. But there was this issue with my brother, a suit of [...]
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