Category Archives: DMing

Long-Term Campaigns and Player Interest

As I work through the second Zelda campaign (as opposed to the Second Zelda campaign, where the party has to figure out which princess is a robot), I’m finding some of my storytelling challenges are different from my normal campaigns. … Continue reading

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Cooperative Content Design

The players in my 4E campaign are currently at L10 and a short side-quest away from L11, which means they’re eying paragon paths. We’ve been flipping through a few books to put together some decent candidates, some obvious (the archer … Continue reading

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Running a Video Game (or, an Apology My Players Don’t Want)

By my own standards I’ve been a terrible DM lately. When my latest campaign began, I didn’t give my players the normal pre-campaign survey. I haven’t been asking players to build levels for me. I haven’t been designing all encounters … Continue reading

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Removing Ability Scores

I got an interesting comment on my recent post In Defense of D&D Stats in Simple Language: What Measure is an 18?, and I think it merits discussion before we change topics: Out of curiosity, I wonder what your opinion … Continue reading

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In Defense of D&D Stats in Simple Language: The Definition of Charisma

Last post I responded to some of the comments on D&D Stats in Simple Language with “we’re both right”. Things don’t translate perfectly from one edition to another, and the stats simply won’t work if they’re applied to earlier or … Continue reading

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In Defense of D&D Stats in Simple Language: What Measure is an 18?

One of the neat bits about having a blog is that I post things that generate discussion. It’s one thing to say something in a group of similarly-minded DMs and have a talk before a session starts, but it’s quite … Continue reading

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The Life of a Prop (or, Confessions of a Dire Pack Rat)

I moved a bunch when I was younger. I didn’t pack up my life every six months and shuffle around the country, but I had a lot of opportunity to clean out my desk drawers. As annoying as it was, … Continue reading

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Racial Alignment Preferences (or, the Evil of Being Born Human)

There’s been an understanding in previous editions that most NPCs are neutral. That is, neutral is the default of the universe for any creature with the ability to have an alignment (as opposed to fiends, celestials, dragons, etc. who are … Continue reading

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The Great Tower of Oldechi: Conclusion

I’m still really, really happy with this campaign. Normally the further removed I am from a campaign the more I see what I did wrong and the less I remember about its successes, which is why I had to reread … Continue reading

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The Great Tower of Oldechi: Giza

The thing I liked most about Senna was that he wasn’t entirely wrong. Players do love causing havoc. In my experience there’s nothing a player enjoys more than doing something for which they believe the GM is not prepared, whether … Continue reading

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