Goodness, it has been another year. This year I started a Patreon, and for a small-time gaming blog, it does incredibly well thanks to the generosity of friends and readers. Blog traffic both here and over at Tr...
2019-11-17 05:13:37 +0000 UTC View PostI'm interested in making your experience of being my patron as interesting and fun as possible. I'm posting content as often as I can, which is less often than I'd like - it would be great to get back up to 3/month, but that's not going to be reliably possible anytime soon.
What kinds...
2019-11-03 15:33:53 +0000 UTC View PostA couple of months ago, cherished reader Jonathan McGee asked me for my thoughts on the 1st-level spell compelled duel. At the time, my answer could be summed up as, “I’m not sure I’ve thought about it at all,” so I told him I would give it some work when I could. ...
2019-11-01 21:02:46 +0000 UTC View PostIn a recent blog post, Sly Flourish talks about 1st level as the high-water mark for danger in 5e. This sparked a conversation about danger and difficulty levels in 5e more generally. I also follow ...
2019-10-24 16:45:54 +0000 UTC View Post
In a boffer LARP campaign, it does a lot of good for the wandering-monster gameplay experience if the players have a steady supply of reasons to move around the game site in small groups. That is, it both improves the experience of being a wandering monster (and yes, people playing monst...
2019-10-07 16:35:05 +0000 UTC View PostOf all the domains that have seen official support in 5e, there are a few ongoing, surprising gaps compared to the 3.5 list of domains and, for that matter, 4e builds. In this case – as if the title of the post didn’t give it away! – I’m talking about a domain of Earth or Stone. Nature, F...
2019-09-24 17:36:11 +0000 UTC View PostIn last year’s 4e megathread, I listed a bunch of awesome spell names and concepts that hadn’t been officially brought into 5e. In this post, I’m offering one possible way of converting fo...
2019-09-10 21:23:34 +0000 UTC View PostThis is the conclusion of my series on advancing your background. If you've forgotten what the heck is going on here, go back to Part One.
I’ve been listening to a lot of the Court of Swords podcast lately, so I assume that its recent blood-transfusion stories have a lot to do with where the ideas for these magic items came from. Anyway, over in Twitter I wrote: S...
2019-08-10 05:11:07 +0000 UTC View PostThis post is, in short, absolutely not what I should be working on right now, but I have to get it out of my head and onto your screen before I can make myself work on anything else, so here we are. My friends who have been deeply involved in the Camarilla or NERO have always had a persp...
2019-07-27 05:32:26 +0000 UTC View PostThis is a continuation of the last post. I'm working through more of the Player's Handbook Backgrounds and official variants.
Criminal (Spy)
By surviving one or ...
2019-07-22 04:37:50 +0000 UTC View PostI’m a bigtime fan of 5e’s introduction of Backgrounds, particularly as a source of skill and tool proficiencies and noncombat features. Even more than (most) classes and subclasses, Backgrounds also suggest a trajectory of your personal story, beyond zero-to-hero. But within that arc, your Ba...
2019-06-28 15:34:48 +0000 UTC View PostA few days ago in Twitter, and in a friend’s Discord channel, I posed some questions about how a setting might respond to the existence of charm person and, implicitly, higher-grade mind-control magic. I want to be 100% clear about this: this is a thought experiment, not me telling you...
2019-06-17 03:45:19 +0000 UTC View PostI've released a new PDF of monk subclasses for 5e, through Tribality Publishing. It's available to you for free as Patreon backers. If you've already bought it through DTRPG, I hope you don't mind - your money supported not only me, but also Dave Jumaquio and the good folks of the Tribality team....
2019-06-13 12:47:42 +0000 UTC View PostThis is the story of how, a couple of weeks ago, I had an idea eight years too late for the problem it solves. There's a lot of development history to go into this, though, so bear with me and I'll get to it - or you can skip straight to the Contractor Work header below.
Locks...
2019-06-02 04:46:34 +0000 UTC View PostI don’t know if this is going to be one of my Unpopular Opinions, but I think it’s easy to look at the warlock Pacts (not Patrons, just Pacts) and expect them to deliver more than the designers seem to have intended. Today I want to talk about the Pact of the Chain, because I think there’s ...
2019-05-25 04:56:24 +0000 UTC View PostAs part of the Seas of Vodari project, I’m creating new spells for nautical adventures. Thinking back to 3.x, I recall a lot of highly-specialized spells that were okay for wizards, but so situational that any Spells Known class can’t justify taking them. My goal, then, is to create sea- and ...
2019-05-06 20:32:43 +0000 UTC View Post