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Category Archives: DMing
An Attempt at Truly Improvisational DMing
Over the course of my DMing career, I’ve slowly moved from a rigid style to something looser. When I started off, I was one of those DMs who had to have every beat of the story planned, every NPC statted … Continue reading
Wish
Some years ago, when I frequented the Wizards D&D message boards, there was a user whose signature said something to the effect of “the spiked chain exists to find the DMs brave enough to ban Core material”. That is, the … Continue reading
The Art of Art
Our campaigns tend to have three names: an real one, a colloquial one, and a snarky one. I’ve talked about how The Eight Arms and the Memento Mori quickly became The Monster-Hunting Campaign and soon after became The Monster-Friending Campaign. … Continue reading
House Rule: Three-Axis Cosmology
Especially astute readers may have picked up on this in the last article: …the players suffered a planar travel mishap and ended up on Carceri, the plane of prisons…Instead I told the players on their way out the door that … Continue reading
The Art of the Retcon
I’m wrong a lot. Like, a lot. It’s a big part of the reason my first campaigns were so incredibly linear, because I couldn’t reconcile being the all-powerful expert running the game with being the guy who thought his rubber … Continue reading
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DMing with Intelligence
Except my wife, our first guest DM is probably the person with whom I have spend the most gaming time. He’s the player behind Mikau the Unwitting and Hadarai and the DM behind The Gods are Dead, Long Live the … Continue reading
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Making a Puzzle Boss
The steps for building a puzzle boss are pretty much the same as building any kind of encounter, or any kind of story, ever. That is: Goal: The players want something Conflict: The DM puts an obstacle in their way … Continue reading
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Puzzle Bosses
In my career I’ve seen the designers of D&D try to approach boss monsters in several ways. In 3E a boss is a monster with a CR higher than the party level, which usually means it has higher defenses, bigger … Continue reading
Changing 4E Monster Hit Points
Our house roles are the kinds of things that pop up organically. We don’t sit down at the beginning of the campaign and say “rolling a 20 on your critical confirmation roll has a chance to kill an enemy outright, … Continue reading
Posted in DMing, House Rules
Tagged D&D 4E, Zelda Campaigns
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On D&D as a Brand
As I’ve mentioned before, I follow professional wrestling, and today I want to talk Sunday’s WWE event, “Hell in a Cell”. Its namesake is the Hell in a Cell match, which is the big brother of a steel cage match. … Continue reading →