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The In Thing To Do

Okay, so everyone on the internet is doing it, why not me. Time for me to do my D&D Next article. First, let me say, that this will be my one and only D&D Next article until we get much closer to the release…the release that does not have a date at this time. It [...]

Homebrew: Dragon Spirit Pact Hexblade

Dragon Spirit Pact is a reflavoring of the Infernal Pact for the Hexblade Warlock. This generally involves changing the power names and flavor text, but I made some slight mechanical changes to try and fit the flavor better. Since I’m attempting to emulate a metallic Spirit Wyrm (see below the cut), I generally changed powers [...]

Dazed and Confused

It has been a while since I’ve been able to play any D&D, but that hasn’t stopped me from thinking about it every day. Something that I’ve made a stink about in the past and which still tweaks my nerves is the subject of the conditions labeled “Dazed” and “Stunned.” I think I may have [...]

Opportunity Actions: Races of Athas – Gnomes Revisited

Here I am, once again diving into a series. I want to go back to my Races of Athas series, and clean things up a bit. I’ve had some time to think about a few of these, and I think I can improve on what I’ve written. I hope you see these as improvements, too. [...]

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 [...]