Recent content by Benjamin Olson

Yep. It only worked for me because I often brought in battlemaps, sometimes even when there was no battle, which meant that I could provide the visual clue of having the gargoyles as "room decor" without actually saying "you see gargoyles" and that the players didn't immediately assume as soon...

One of my coolest encounters was gargoyles. I had mentioned that one of the temples in town had become so rich they covered their large dome in sheets of gold and the party decided to go up there and heist it. Amazingly nobody reacted to the many gargoyles on the battlemap, presumably because...

Well the one I think we need to raise awareness of is the Bonnacon: It is a cowardly bull-like creature who runs away from its enemies, but beware pursuers, for when chased it will spray its trail with fecal matter which has the power to burn you like like a sort of fire, and it can lay down...

I seem to recall having similar problems a few weeks back on my computer but I think I just had to restart my browser and log back in here, and it doesn't sound like that will resolve your issue.

It's a point of milestone leveling for some people. One may also want to have a milestone simply to bring everyone up to appropriate level for the next phase of the campaign, in which case it doesn't really matter if someone got there a session or two early, or the milestone may simply be a very...

There seems to be a divergence between a ttrpg folk tradition of spectacular crits and fumbles and what most actual game designers want to put into actual rules. This is most prominent in 5e D&D, but I'm pretty sure it's true of other games as well (ie: my Daggerheart group definitely makes...

XP should be for accomplishing things the game wants me to accomplish, whether killing monsters, overcoming obstacles, finding locations, hauling treasure back to town, just making successful checks, some sort of downtime training activity, or reaching some sort of milestone. The key thing to me...

Take your content and run with it? Are you worried about someone stealing your ideas or just about the game getting out of your hands in some way? I wouldn't worry about either. I think the ideal plan to find playtesters for D&D content is to play D&D in general with a lot of different people...

Yeah, I half wrote out another point about how really adventure design is too rooted in the limitations of physical books, and realistically a lot of small-time adventure authors should lean more into the fact that their work will overwhelmingly be consumed digitally, but having only consumed a...

I've never written a module and most that I've run have not been good from an "running accessibility" standpoint. That said I've thought about this a lot and the main thing holding me back from publishing (other than laziness) is not feeling like I knew what good should look like (I'm really...

I'm excited, I just wish I knew for what. It's not Kelvin, it doesn't sound like a film outing for any established television cast. So another reboot? Or an original ensemble of characters? The filmmakers definitely succeeded on making an ensemble of original characters work in an established...

I mean ideas get into people's heads all sorts of ways, but I think if the two are connected it's because the origin source for both is likely that so many plays of Shakespeare (of which both Stoppard and Kurosowa were obviously avid fans) involve a secondary cast of (usually menial) characters...

I think the most useful high level adventure(s) would be ones built around achieving whatever long term character goals are most common, since many tables would be going into a high level adventure with characters looking at least vaguely towards some sort of retirement. Obviously the ideal...

My only changes would be prefacing it with a note to the DM that "In this room the player character meet STRAHD, read this aloud:", and cutting down on read aloud text elsewhere in the module. I agree it's not good as a typical standard for how to present a room, but it's okay to have a...