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 ...

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 ...

Sammy the Snek was leading her party on a mission to break into the mayor's mansion and retrieve a ledger proving the mayor is in cahoots with an evil cult. Things seemed to be going pretty well on the way in, but on the way out, the party ran into trouble. They'd chosen to break into the mansion in broad daylight, and several neighbors had seen the party unlock and sneak in through a window. When they came out the same window, the city guard was waiting with an ambush they couldn't roll their way out of. The party was apprehended and thrown in the dungeon. Here's the problem, though: Sammy the Snek is a burglar by trade. She's been breaking into houses for years and has never been caught. Sammy's friends in the city's underbelly are shocked — she should have known better. It just doesn't make sense that Sammy would botch the job with such a rookie mistake. Reverse metagaming In forum discussions of this situation, many people would blame the ...