Recent content by talien

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.

Took a while, I appreciate you reading to the end!

I've eliminated almost all of my bad gamer habits except this one: I will shamelessly and repeatedly invest in Humble Bundles that catch my eye. I blame you Darryl! 😁

Day 7 began before dawn with the roaring wind. At 3:30 a.m., the wind bellowed so loudly it was hard to think, though mercifully it never reached our tents. Fearing we'd be blown off the mountain peak trying to scale the Tooth of Time, our leaders decided to wait it out for another hour. In...

I really do think this is something players figure out for themselves. DMs who are players, IME, tend towards immersion because they are often in NPC mindsets -- and NPCs aren't always out to win, they do lots of things that aren't optimized for survival but make sense. That's the whole point of...

You make a good point which is that horror, by necessity, requires immersion. I've learned this the hard way that you can't "fake" immersion with a group resistant to it. They just get frustrated. In my action horror campaign, my brother was the only player who actually played being afraid (and...

Recent example from my campaign: I had monsters that if you attacked them would cause your valuables to burst into flames. Each PC who fought the monsters rolled and saved, but had no valuables (monks amirite?), so nothing happened. PLAYER of hexblade character knew this was the consequence and...

This never gets old:

Yeah it's so funny I didn't really have to make up a fantasy name in the fantasy retelling cause it's dramatic enough. It looks like a tooth as you'll see. I did think it was funny that the staffers were just having fun while we're all stressing about water and food and endurance. Their camps...

Day 6 began with a truly magical, if challenging, experience. A staff member, dressed fittingly in wizard robes, led us in the morning up a scramble of rugged rocks to see the sunrise. She easily scaled the rocks while the rest of us huffed and puffed (me in particular), struggling with the...

It's hard to imagine this being the name of an adventure. It's like "into Greyhawk." Now it seems a rather boring way to title it, but back then FG wasn't an established setting, so that was meant to evoke mystery, I suspect. Now it's all "Forgotten Realms? I remember them, I was there yesterday!"

Jon Peterson's Playing at the World makes it clear Gygax wasn't using Tolkien as a base when he started out, but Tolkien was massively influential (in the way Star Wars would later be) at the time he was writing D&D and so he wisely made those connections in Chainmail, etc. The problem was he...