Dungeon Funtimes

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 ...

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...