Recent content by talien

I agree, to a point. The issue becomes that monsters can never sneak up on/pick off stragglers, because there NEVER are stragglers. Many monsters, especially those who operate in packs, rely on precisely this kind of vulnerability. My hike demonstrated how hard it is to keep up marching order...

Yeah, this is part of the challenge of party order that sort of gets static fast. My experience hiking (and the constant concerns that mountain lions were going to pick us off in the dark) is that it's actually really hard to march in a specific order for very long. Random things break this...

Right, theater of the mind makes this a little blurry. This is why "shooting into melee" is often ill-defined depending on the edition of D&D, because it implies someone is in front of someone else, and D&D resists that.

Picture courtesy of Pixabay. In theory, party order is a neat line where everyone stays in place. In reality, boredom, fatigue, and rough terrain can all conspire to break it up. The rigid lines drawn on paper rarely survive the messy reality of dynamic environments and human (or adventuring...

I missed this issue for some reason, but this? This is the same premise behind Peter Adkison's The Primal Order: The Primal Order - Wikipedia The Primal Order is now known far more for the legal battles it created than the actual system. I do love the system's concept, but have had difficulty...

And I'd make all the dinos have feathers. "The entire park is just...a GIANT CHICKEN FARM?! BWAKH BWAKH BWAKH!" (that'll kill the franchise right quick)

In theory, the original point was to "give PCs something to spend their money on" but as you pointed out it can easily have the reverse effect as costs skyrocket. Gygax was always worried that there really was no point to adventurers perpetually adventuring if they kept getting rich from their...

Soo...just playing through all the Jurassic Park movies in a row, basically (and somewhere in th emiddle, they reboot and new Stupid Villains™️ try the exact same thing on a different island).

This is one of those fun thought-experiment ideas that I think most tables got sick of after a while. Players love it, until you realize: Law of averages means monsters hit PCs more often. And thus get more crits. And thus roll on tables that lead to utterly gruesome combat in a way that's...

Yeah, to your point for low level parties a Gandalf-style NPC might make more sense. Sometimes though, it's just the bigger/stronger character of the group. Acknowledging they exist is something else though. I find that I don't always know how these will play out in D&D until the players are...

Not ours, but some went as high as 20+ yes. Our was 10, which was "adventurer sized" (still on the high side, but if you recall old school D&D there were roving bands of henchmen/hirelings along w/ the PCs). I like your choices better than mine, actually!

I learned a lot from my week-long, 30-mile trek through the rugged Cimarron, New Mexico backcountry, and the parallels between managing a hiking crew and guiding a Dungeons & Dragons party became strikingly clear. Just like an adventuring party navigating a dungeon, a group embarking on a...

In the early days of companies publishin their supposedly converted adventures from D&D 2.0 to D&D 3.5, the 5 ft. square (which we now take for granted) was not common. Because it was theater of the mind, the assumption was PCs just filed into rooms I guess. Well, one of the room was a trash...

And for me it's not the damage, it's the in-game way characters react to it. If a player is willing to role-play his character as being afraid of falling off a roof, that's fine with me if the damage isn't that bad. Conversely, I had a NPC end himself by stepping off a balcony 30 feet up and the...

Agreed. I do think the aforementioned test of "player knows about potential harm, character doesn't" pretty quickly shows where players are on the spectrum.