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...

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...

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 ...

One of the most unique aspects of roleplaying games is that players aren't just players — they're also characters and audiences. But that means that sometimes, for the sake of the story, that they need to be careful not to let their desires as audience members influence their actions as characters. Metagaming is when a player acts on information their character doesn't have, usually spoiling the fun for the other players. The idea is that since the character is a different person who grew up in a different world and has had unique experiences, there are a lot of things that the character knows that the player doesn’t, and vise versa. I don’t know how to cook a delicious pie, but my 160-year-old half-elven grandma sorcerer Nina does. Likewise, Nina does not own a Monster Manual, and therefore she doesn’t know the challenge rating and vulnerabilities of every evil creature she may meet. OOC talk Some new players get metagaming mixed up with out-of-character talk. Wh...