Dungeon Funtimes

Alexa the Artificer needed a way to contain the immortal shoggoth her party just trapped, but she had just the thing: "I build a rocketship and send the shoggoth to the moon." "Hang on now," the DM says. "Rocketships don't exist in this world." "This sucks," Alexa says. "You're not 'yes-and-ing' me. You really need to take some improv lessons if this campaign is ever going to go anywhere." "Yes and"? As D&D has expanded from its wargaming roots and picked up more improv storytelling over the years, the question comes up more often: As a DM, is it better to "say yes" to everything, or is it better to tell players that something's impossible when it doesn't fit in your world? The core mechanic A balance between the two extremes pivots on the "core mechanic." A core mechanic is gameplay at its most stripped-down, something that forms the foundation of the game and you end

I'm very intrigued by Mike Mearls's Greyhawk Initiative variant . If you're unfamiliar with it, Greyhawk Initiative is a variant where instead of rolling once per encounter and having fixed slots in initiative, players roll every round. And instead of rolling a d20, the dice you roll depend on what you'd like to do. The system is meant to increase the tension and unpredictability of combat, and I'm 100 percent in favor of that. As a DM, keeping combat from dragging — and keeping players involved with the game and not their phones — can be tricky. Greyhawk Initiative has been widely panned by players on first sight, however. Adding more complexity to initiative and requiring a roll every round does seem like a strange way to make combat more exciting. I've been DMing for new players for the past little while and so I'm reluctant to try it out myself. For one, I'd like them to start out with as close to a vanilla 5th Edition experience as I can g

You have to be some kind of supergenius to calculate XP, right? Well, hang on a minute. My most recent D&D campaign isn't really a campaign at all — I'm calling it a series of one-shots. It's an open-world setting based on a post-apocalyptic version of my hometown. It's handy, because then the map and the setting are already pretty familiar to locals. I want people to drop in and out, to just come when they'd like and not worry that they're missing some monumental battle or plot twist. But that "one-shot series" structure means that I can't really use milestone advancement, which is my go-to progression variant in 5th Edition. But luckily, the 5e rules provide some handy tools for awarding XP — even if they don't always spell out how to use them outside of killing monsters (more on that later!). Milestones vs. story-based advancement It seems like most people are using "milestone advancement" to mean awarding the party a

What do you do when your character has a hard time getting into the action? Even though adventure hooks are dangled right in front of some characters, it's hard to figure out why they'd bite, given that character's traits. Of course, the best solution is to work with your DM before the campaign starts to get a character motivation specific to the campaign's plot. When that's not a possibility, make a character with a versatile motive — one who has a reason to get involved in any adventuring situation. Here are some basic adventurer motivations for you to put your own twist on: Altruism This one's listed first because it's the one of the most classic heroic motivations. Altruistic heroes stand as guardians over regular people threatened by sinister forces. They realize there's a lot of evil and suffering out there in the world, and their talents and abilities mean they're among the few people who can do something about it. Putting a twist