Recent content by Brotton Goodfellow

I’m tinkering around with positioning and movement rules in combat encounters and am wondering if anyone else has experience with doing so as well. My main design goal was to make being close to an opponent or multiple opponents stickier and dangerous without bogging down play or being too...

Voted usually: I love playing in those first few levels and I love running games for those levels. If I’ve got some veterans at the table I might start at 2 or 3.

Once again, I introduce to the world THE CUP OF DOOM. Have a cup at the table. Preferably one that is also a skull. Fill it with 2D6 per player. The players can add any amount of these D6’s to ANY rolls. They have to take at least two dice from the CoD and a result of 1 does not count. The...

You may be right, but I still think it’s dramatic as hell. I imagine a character at 1HP, face bloodied, on deaths door, watching as the world burns around them. The party is out of healing. A choice is presented: Push through and continue to fight or get pricked by a goblin arrow for 1 point of...

You’re on to something. I’d increase the risk and the reward though. Permanently lose a death saving throw but immediately regain 1/2 of HP Max. There’s not much use in just rolling a hit die if it means I go from 1HP to 3HP. I’m still in danger of getting knocked to zero and having to roll...

Death is always on the table in my games. I’ll throw dangerous encounters at my players, but I won’t make that the primary source of fear in the game. To quote Rocky IV, “If he dies, he dies.” I know my players enjoy the thrill of battle and there’s been lots of close calls. I’ve actually...

Become the forever DM and never have to deal with the problem to begin with

Become the forever DM and never have to deal with the problem to begin with.

It’s harder to do (for me anyway), but instead of my players feeling afraid their characters are going to die, I attempt to make them afraid of the consequences of failing. I’ve long since accepted that 5E was designed to keep characters alive, and the majority of 5E players, don’t play the game...

I know there’s games that use dice pools for DM’s but for me the idea came from trying to implement a Doom Mechanic as per Conan 2D20. I love the idea of characters pushing their luck until it runs out. I recently bought Nord Games box set of critical hit cards, and it came with good/bad...

Great blogpost. There’s two ways I’ve baked fear into my 5E game. 1. Roll initiative every round: A D6 gets rolled by one of the players, and they have to meet or beat my D6 roll if they want to go before the monsters. If I went last in the previous round and then win initiative the next...

I think the DM was trying to be spontaneously dramatic without knowing they were pulling the rug out from underneath you when they had the spiders eat your wizard. Whether they realized it or not, they had set an expectation that once characters are dropped to zero, enemies leave them alone. Had...

One thing I did was have the patrons ultimate goal line up with the parties. Had a warlock player whose patron was vecna. The big baddies in the campaign had the Book of Vile Deeds. Vecna wanted that book. The rest of the party had no clue what was going on. It was in Vecna’s best interest to...

Currently, I’m running a dungeon crawl, and the only source of light that works is a magic crystal. It’s the only thing that can penetrate the magical darkness blanketing the dungeon. Anyway, to highlight the oppressive nature of the darkness, I literally turned out the lights and used two small...

I use the D&D beyond character sheet, and also a cue card for my 13th level fighter. I put all the to hit bonuses and damage options, as well as class/weapon mastery options I get for a single attack action. I still forget half the stuff that character can do.