For playing Keep on the Borderlands I wanted a 2024 D&D PC without spells or weapon mastery. Good thing I like playing monks.

At $100, I passed on the Deck of Many Things, but on sale at $50 I succumbed. I’m pleasantly surprised by this chimera. A deck, more cards, plus help using it for divination as in Ravenloft, & for random adventure ideas. Plus 192 pages of loosely related PC options, locations, NPCs, magic & more.

Spells in Pathfinder 2 where a single failed save can take a creature out of a fight have the incapacitation trait, which gives creatures more than twice the spell's rank a high chance to resist. PF2 players, how well does this work in play?

Years ago I posted about D&D adventures that included poster battle maps. I never uncovered a series of boxed adventures that followed the 1991 black box basic edition of D&D. Adventures like The Dragons Den (1992) included maps, counters, and more. They even got a Thunder Rift setting box.

I've sure had plenty of fun with gelatinous cubes back in the day. Even if it's perfectly invisible (!), it seems like an adventurer might smell a gelatinous cube before walking into it. Or notice that noises sound different when you're close to it. But maybe I'm overthinking it.

I can’t remember the last announcement that brought me so much excitement and anticipation.

After my 1st-level party met a gelatinous cube, I'm thinking about it's transparency. Originally surprise on 1-3. As a DM, I've been inconsistent in running that aspect. We spotted the cube once and ran away (smart), and later walked right into it (1 dead PC and nearly 2 more).

In 1983, D&D had pages of tables to determine to-hit numbers. In the D&D-inspired Palladium RPG (1983) the to-hit number on a d20 for every attack was 5! Always 5. That quirk fascinates me.

Joke PCs bug me, but with so much of my DMing for public play, I learned to tolerate them. Besides, I felt wary of being the cranky old guy bitching about someone's fun. So this @dungeondudes.bsky.social video about playing joke PCs in campaigns scores a crit. Brilliantly explained! And funny too

This is interesting. The number of third party #DnD products being produced each year dropped sharply after 2023 back down to 2015 levels. The two big things I would attribute that to (off the top of my head) are the OGL crisis and the announcement of D&D 2024. www.enworld.org/threads/how-...

Every time I mentioned that I needed to register for GameHole my spouse laughed in wonder that any business would choose the name GameHole. I always think of the quote, “If we had known our band would be so successful, we probably wouldn’t have named it Toad the Wet Sprocket.”

Wow. Gamehole con’s wishlist system makes event registration wonderfully easy. Done!

GameHole has an event where you can join legendary Traveller creator Marc Miller to roll up PCs! Folks tend to chuckle about how Traveller PCs can die during creation, but Marc owns it as a solo mini-game and an early life-path system. I played that mini-game a lot.

Watched @treantmonk.bsky.social run the numbers on the overwhelming, bonkers power of the 2024 spell Conjure Celestial. Good grief. However marvelous the individual members of the D&D team may be, the team clearly suffers from a gap in their skill set. youtu.be/kqmyUED9-l

More Draw Steel? Yes. Please. I got to play in this one with @d20play.bsky.social and @dmdavid.com and others. Fun game!

I had zero Dark Sun experience until I played in @alphastream.bsky.social‘s Ashes of Athas organized play campaign. Everyone was laughing about how the chef NPC was a halfling. Took me a while to learn that Dark Sun’s setting’s halflings were known as cannibals. It’s Dark, you know.

Look what arrived in the post. Wee little RPG books!

If I were king of D&D, one of my goals for 6e would be to steer away from any class powers that boost characters early in a fight. Example: Don’t design subclasses that get extra actions in the first round. Steer towards building power. Example: abilities that unlock after PCs size up a foe

Draw Steel features many virtues but the way that characters and villains power up as a fight continues ranks as the best

I loved hearing Teos and Shawn talk about my post on 5 tropes that ruin D&D sessions, particularly when they started thinking about ways a DM might overcome some tropes’ pitfalls. youtu.be/QO9PBHDXZZ4

I remember lining up to get the new book at Gen Con. That same year, I got a ticket to play Into the Dragon’s Lair run by Sean Reynolds. When he brought out his B&W, plain-paper copy of the still unreleased DMG, a holy light shone down on it from heaven accompanied by a divine chorus

Looking forward to this! Join us as we dive into the released version of Draw Steel with its lead designer, @jamesintrocaso.bsky.social! We will talk about what's next, look at the Road to Broadhurst pregens, and answer your questions from the chat! youtube.com/live/TPHZ-mj...

My D&D tastes are too narrow to love the Candyland meets fairytale aesthetic of Dragon Delves: Chapter 2 - Baker's Doesn't, but I still enjoyed the adventure. It included dark contrasts and when we met obstacles, I felt like we had a lot of options.

I just learned @themonstersknow.com has a blog for topics outside monster tactics. I relished his thought provoking post on the mix of magic and mundane in fantasy and how D&D keeps steering to more unreal worlds. www.onefootinfairyland.com/a-wizard-cre...

Given the niche subject, I’m astonished that The Comic Book History of Roleplaying Games got made. I know the story, but I’m still loving the retelling. No superpowers or slugfests so far. Will Gary battle Dave over AD&D royalties in the sky above Lake Geneva?

Thanks to living 1 hour from the University of Wisconsin Parkside and another era's low standards for leaving kids unattended, my first Gen Con was in 1981. I saved the program. dmdavid.com/Gen_Con_XIV_...

I always wished WotC would bring in character optimization experts to help develop their character options. Well, the lead designer of 2014 5E @mearls.bsky.social did this on behalf of Chaosium by bringing in @treantmonk.bsky.social to help make Cthulhu by Torchlight outstanding.

Great list! One way to approach some of these (if you dare) is to consider and clearly frame the scenario's "positive outcome". The default positive outcome is "we win by beating the bad guys." A loss scenario can be more palatably presented as "we win by getting to the portal and escaping."

This is partly covered by loss of gear, but I think deserves its own category also: loss of powers. Some of the best most compelling moments in fiction is when Wolverine loses his healing factor, or Superman is rendered limp by kryptonite. In d&d these tend to just be frustrating.

Stories thrive on setbacks, but trying to create some of the twists that work brilliantly in a book or movie just makes players angry in a D&D game. dmdavid.com/tag/5-tropes...

While polishing up a post for tomorrow, I mused about how my posts differ from something an LLM might create. Like AI: I use em-dashes and verbs like "mused." Not like AI: I do low-probability things like using behind-the-scenes stories from the making of Star Wars to make a point about D&D.

Thank you, Gary. #GaryGygaxDay

I love reading about the history of roleplaying games, so I relished Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in Ground. Experience Points is a slim pamphlet of outtakes cut for space At $15 it’s a bad value compared to the hardcover, but a good value considering I’ve spent more on a drink I enjoyed much less

I’m excited to talk to Chris. He always has smart insights into the game

I bought this 175-page, full-color Ultimate Random Encounters Book for under $12 and I’m charmed by it. Most of the encounters are very evocative adventure hooks. Some are more goofy than anything I would use, but they all fire my imagination.

If Pixar made a Forgotten Realms movie, it would look like these covers. (I’m unbothered by that)

The new VP of franchise for for D&D, Dan Ayoub, talks about moving D&D to a "full franchise model", but his predecessor, Jess Lanzillo was also "VP of Franchise", so just how new is this focus on franchise?

Name something that works well in stories, but badly when set up to happen in an RPG. Example: Trusted characters who betray the heroes.

Am I the only player who avoids some character features because they interfere with game flow? For example, I fell out of love with familiars because all the help actions seem to slow play with extra conversation and the scouting can turn the game into a lengthy 1-on-1 sideshow.

I’m fascinated by the death mechanics in D&D-adjacent games like Draw Steel and Dggerheart that let PCs die in glorious sacrifice. Perhaps my favorite appears in the unreleased Delve RPG by @delvesrm.bsky.social. I still want to see that game.

I just learned my 20-year-old failed to appreciate the brilliance of Big Trouble in Little China. New parents, eventually your kids will turn into different people too. I didn’t know success could sting like this

Some recent D&D adventures left me wondering if Wizards had lost everyone who knew how to translate ideas and lore into a scenario that plays well at the table. But my first look at Dragon Delves and its back-to-basics approach leaves me impressed. It looks excellent!

Lately I’ve been full nerd reading The Meints Index to Glorantha and This is Free Trader Beowulf - A System History of Traveller. The vast history of 3rd party stuff for Runequest & Traveller astonished me. Despite being an early fan, I had zero idea any of it existed.

My 20-year-old and her friends are at the dining table playing a diceless RPG called Tactiquest, which somehow I have never heard of. Seems real, even though Tactiquest sounds like the 80s RPG that an AI might hallucinate

Daggerheart's reaction rolls take the place of saving throws. "Other characters can't help you with reaction rolls." This helps make reaction rolls feel sudden and avoids a lull where player look for boons they can send to other PCs. How would a similar restriction on saves play in a 5E game?

Perhaps you missed wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/new-runequest/ and wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/runequest-fa... ?

Chaosium announced some staffing changes, including that Mike Mearls is leaving for Asmodee, but will still contribute to a new edition of RuneQuest currently in development. I look quizzically at my 2018 slipcase of a newish Runequest. Did I miss an announcement or did Chaosium bury the the lede?

In Daggerheart, players select cards to represent their characters main spells and powers. I like that you can have at most 5 cards active at a time. I've played some high-power games lately where all the player options result in some decision paralysis.

I’ll be playing in this one