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Opportunity Actions: Put Down The Dice!

This past weekend, I ran Encounters at PAX East. I had the time of my life. It felt like DM Boot Camp, and, in a lot of ways, it truly was. I ran one group after another, watching different players create different group dynamics, frequently with the same group of characters. Seeing these different interpretations [...]

Digging into Dragon Age RPG

If you hadn’t heard about the Dragon Age RPG before, the last few weeks on Twitter probably made you aware of it. Many players and DMs, wanting a switch from D&D4e on either a permanent or  short term basis, have been giving it a try. And chances are that if you’ve been seeing the conversations [...]

Speeding up D&D 4E

Much digital ink has been spilled on the topic of speeding up combat in Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. I think at this point we can all at least agree that combat can grow a bit sluggish at times. The interesting thing is, and it’s something that some people have touched upon at various points in the 4E lifecycle already, that there seems to be a paradigm shift away from the simple “4E is slow because of combat”, and I think that’s a very good thing.

The “new” (and it’s not new, just only discussed by a select few in the past) idea is that the problem lies more in adventure design than combat sluggishness. @glimmthegnome on Twitter planted the seed of this idea for me a couple of weeks ago, @gamefiend pushed it along, and @neogrognard put it into words in his Save My Game column on the Wizards website last week.

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 [...]

Aspects of GMing: DFRPG vs D&D

As many of you know, I am a huge D&D fan. I have played for many years and I love the game. Since I recently started GMing a Dresden Files RPG game, I have been reflecting on the differences in running these two games. As such, I thought it may be appropriate to discuss some [...]

Infernal Save Points

In Alio’s rant yesterday about Dante’s Inferno, he brought up the ever-interesting computer RPG topic of save points. If you’re as old as me, you may have computer game memories where the party gets slaughtered, having to restart at the last save point, and then slogging through the same four hours of dungeon to get [...]

Special Free Holiday Delve!

Holidays mean many things… family, joy, faith, thankfulness, and FREE DELVES!! I have been working on a secret project for all of you. Along with Tracy from the SarahDarkmagic Blog, Jeff from the Tome Show, and Jeremiah from McCoy’s Geeky Emporium of Thought, I have been writing a very special holiday delve for you. This [...]