Category Archives: Commentary

DMG Basic Rules – A Quick Comment

I’m sure I’ll be spending some time going over the basic version of the DMG, which the World Engineer was kind enough to link and which you can find here, but I had to get this one out. Most of … Continue reading

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Player’s Handbook

I’ve spent about a week going through my copy of the The Dungeons and Dragons Strikes Back Player’s Handbook. It’d love to give a review if it, I really would. But normally when I look at a book that book … Continue reading

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In Defense of the Indefensible

World Engineer has a post about the impending 5th Edition, and I find it hard to disagree with most of what he says. Fighting over editions is bad, there’s no need to convert people, and so on and so forth. … Continue reading

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Masks/Eureka

This blog is pretty unapologetically about D&D (which, for the purposes of this article, is synonymous with Pathfinder). There’s a reason it’s called “DMing with Charisma” and not “GMing with Rapport” or “Storytelling with Manipulation”. That’s not necessarily because it’s … Continue reading

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Mythic Adventures

Lest my previous post come down too hard on one side of the axis, I generally don’t have a problem with powerful, even startlingly so, characters. My concern is with situation where a player’s style is so focused on powergaming … Continue reading

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On Inspiration

Left Oblique and I go back and forth a lot on what systems, players, DMs, and gaming in general are and should be. A lot of it comes down to simulationism versus narrativism, but it’s not always that clear-cut. One … Continue reading

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Ultimate Campaign

Ultimate Campaign is a curious book. It almost doesn’t feel like a book at all, but rather a bunch of small books all put together with the only unifying theme being “these things are kind of neat, but fully optional”. … Continue reading

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On the Magic Item Compendium

Oh Lordy they’re doing it again.

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On Legendary Monsters

Vagrant Story is a video game from a million years ago, back when Square Enix was just Square. It details the adventures of a young man with ridiculous hair and 76% of a pair of pants as he explores the … Continue reading

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On Downtime

It’s not often that I have the opportunity to defend something in 5E, but the downtime system merits special attention. It’s the first mechanic I’ve seen where the startlingly supportive comments are approaching or beyond 50% dissent. This surprises me. … Continue reading

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