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So, funny thing. I was procastinating taking a break from a big translation job, and started putzing around with D&D Beyond, randomly rolling up characters (4d6-drop lowest, in order) just for the fun of it. Unbeknownst to me, but beknownst to many of you, just around then a big debate broke out...

In the course of another thread, I was comparing AD&D and AD&D 2nd Edition. 2nd Edition holds a unique place in my heart. After playing D&D from 1987 to 1991, in 1992 I used the money from my first summer job to buy the core books for 2nd Edition. The original AD&D books left me a little cold...

This post was originally going to be part of the next installment in my A History of TRPGs in Japan thread, but the subject matter is so rich I felt it would be too long. And also, I think this might lead to more discussion, which might derail the History thread. There's actually a bit of info...

So if we go back to the primordial beginnings of TRPGs in Japan, if one looked around a local toy store or hobby shop in Tokyo, and that shop carried imported board games, one might have found an RPG box set or two. The box set would have been in English, so if you felt comfortable with English...

This was originally going to be part of my Let's Read of Sword World 2.5, but I thought this might be of interest even to people who haven't read that thread all the way through. Because Sword World 2.5 has some incredible starter sets that I think RPG publishers could learn from. SW 2.5 has...

When discussions about THAC0 come up, it's common for people to say something to the effect of "Why not just use Ascending AC? Why subtract? It's so weird and off-putting." And I don't really disagree, as far as THAC0 goes. It's not really that complex, and it's a perfectly cromulent system, but...

So, bopping around the internet, looking up some stuff for my Sword World thread, I came across this very interesting page. It's the website of a gaming cafe in Tokyo, and it has a ranking by year of the TRPGs selected for play in the cafe, going back to 2010. It's a wonderful snapshot of the...

Having finished a Let's Read of the rulebook that brought me into RPGs, I thought it would be interesting to do something completely new to myself, and not very well-known by the RPG community at large. Sword World! Japan's most popular fantasy role-playing RPG. My copy will actually arrive in...

This something I just have to get off my chest after watching too many D&D youtubers smugly saying, "WotC says it's not 6th Edition, but actually..." In the RPG context, and particularly the D&D context, the word "edition" is a skunked term. It's skunking began with TSR's pretty drastic...

I did a search, but I don't think these were ever discussed here. Mike Mearls and Rodney Thompson did a post-mortem on the 5th Edition design process at DigiPen Institute of Technology back in 2015. Some of the stuff is old hat by now, as information has trickled out over the years, but it's...

A little tidbit preview from the D&D Twitter feed that I hadn't seen posted yet. It gives an idea of the kinds of madness characters might encounter. Interestingly, I note that none of it is mechanical.

So I was kicking this idea around for a while, as part of my own personal retrospective on the 5e design process, and since a couple people have expressed interest in what the playtest was like, I thought I'd go ahead and do it. So this is going to be broad strokes, since there are a lot of...

Sorry, that laugh was a result of clumsy fingers on my phone.

As a lazy way to spend a Saturday, I decided to look at just how much content was available to a DM who didn't buy any of the Core Books. This first look is at Monsters, which take up the most of the free available PDFs. Just to provide a baseline, the Monster Manual provides 429(!) distinct...

After the announcement of 5th Edition in early January, 2012, our first chance to really get juicy information came later that month at the D&D Experience. There were three panels regarding Next, and an NDA-bound open playtest. The three panels were Charting the Course, with Mike Mearls, Monte...

Throughout the long playtest, there were a lot of highs and lows, moments of anticipation, and even for those excited for 5e, moments of extreme disappointment (I still miss that one iteration of the Rogue...) Of course, there were plenty of opportunities to rage-quit, and many declarations...

A while back I floated the idea of looking at Mearls' L&L articles from before the announcement of 5e, and comparing them with how the final game turned out, once all of the core three were released. Now all three books are out and we have had a bit of time to digest them, so I thought I would...

With my DMG, I tried my hand at creating a Basic D&D Thoul for 5e. What do you think? I was rather surprised at how closely I was able to mimic the Basic version. It's got the same AC, and does roughly the same damage. The HP are much higher, scaling with 5e damage. The CR of 1 works out...

I so enjoyed the latest Acquisitions Incorporated Live Game at PAX that I decided to go back and listen to all the podcasts and rewatch all the live games. Here are my impressions! Acquisitions Incorporated, Season 1, Episode 1 Listen to it here. The story begins in May 2008, before the 4e...

I was seized by a fit of low-level number crunching, and decided to see how experience played out for the first episode of Hoard of the Dragon Queen. Here's what I have. A generally successful party of 4 is assumed. Seek the Keep There are a number of different ways to approach this. The 8...