Dungeon Funtimes

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...

My first exposure to the D&D alignment system was in old DOS games where you could pick your alignments from what looked to me like a jumble of words like "good" and "chaotic." I didn't understand what any of the terms meant, and they all looked like "chaotic true neutral good" to me. Now, of course, I understand that an alignment like that is impossible on the good-evil, lawful-chaotic axes, and I promise I'm rolling my eyes at my younger self just as hard as you are. Hillsfar was my favorite of the few old SSI games we had, because it was basically a burglary simulator. Yes, it also had an archery simulator and an arena simulator and a brute-force-password-cracker simulator (because your older siblings lost the copy-protection code wheel years ago), but the best things to do involved breaking into buildings and looting them. Even if you liked fighting in the arena, you could loot buildings until you were caught and thrown in the arena. T...

Lately, I've seen a lot of DMs who are running or who'd like to run an "open-world" D&D adventure. A lot of excellent video games are open-world, and one of the biggest advantages tabletop games have over video games is the ability to go off-script. A traditional video game is built up of relatively small, obsessively-designed maps with borders you can't go beyond. In D&D, you're only limited by your imagination, game balance and what you feel is right for the fiction. But how do you build an open-world game without going so far that things seem pointless? How do you make a world where players can go anywhere and still make sure there's something for players to do? Take any road you want When I think about about open-world games in D&D, I keep coming back to the first game in that style I ever played: The Legend of Zelda . There's a lot the Nintendo classic can teach DMs about world design. Of course, classic video games can't co...

You don't have to watch the new posts on Reddit's /r/DnD for very long before you see a story of a party that got killed or thrown in the dungeon or something because they started a fight in town. The DM often asks something like, "Am I good?" If everybody had fun, then yes, you're good. If the players are so salty that tired horses are wandering down the stairs and into the basement to lick them, then you have a problem. Sometimes, that problem is a difference in expectations between players and DMs. Players might not understand that there's a focus on consequences in D&D, and DMs might not understand that they're provoking the players. Case study: Tom Petty was right Sometimes the waiting is the hardest part. DM /u/Enddar tells the story on Reddit of how their party was basically started a fight in a waiting room and was killed. They adventurers were on their way to see the king, and a captain acting as their guide was admitted, but a mage ...