Search results

Great story, Gorg! To me, this is the heart of old-school D&D play. Scouting, research, gearing up...all are the proper way to approach any significant monster if you want a decent chance of success without casualties.

No. It's explicitly baked in. No conflating going on at all. Levels are very clear in-world and in-fiction in B/X. A Conjurer knows exactly how many levels they are away from being a Wizard. A warrior knows that Hero is the 4th level and that Superhero is 7th. Different editions, different...

It depends on the edition of D&D. In the version I'm playing, there is literally a name for every level. And your character knows what name they go by. A 3rd-level Cleric is a Priest. A 3rd-level magic-user is a Conjurer. Once a fighter reaches 9th level, they are a Lord and can be granted...

The systems you use to reward players in a game greatly influence the way they will play a game. If you give XP primarily for treasure (as in B/X), you will often see players using their wits to extract treasure with a minimum of fuss and fighting If you give XP primarily for killing...

First time around, the party TPKd. Second time around, they were much more careful - and therefore successful. The dragon was driven off and its loot claimed. :)

Last session was pretty good. The entire group was in costume and we played in a recreation of the Prancing Pony that one of the players had built into the back of their house. Before the game was combat practice for Medieval European Martial Arts and afterwords a fire-cooked meal served on...

I had an archmage shut down a high-level party once with a 9th level Sleep after roughing them up with a couple of AOEs. An average of 90hp put down with no save is pretty potent.

100% hit point recovery, energy drain, etc. on a long rest. "Sleeping off" the unearthly touch of a wight doesn't seem right.

For us this is a feature, not a bug. Powerful monsters with resistance should be hard. Difficult is fun. What's even more fun is figuring out how to defeat a monster without needing to just jump into full on combat every time. I've had my monsters get buried alive, killed by more powerful...

5e has no assumption that the party will own magic items. I've run multi-year campaigns where the number of magic weapons found could be counted on one hand. Magic Weapon bridges that gap and allows a party to have "magic weapons" to combat whatever nasty requires it.

Is a hexcrawl ever really finished? I suppose if you mapped out and tamed the entire world.

In the first D&D I played there weren't different races. It was just the core classes, all assumed to be human. Later Elves, Dwarves, and Halflings were added as classes. The idea seemed to be that only humans varied in their pursuits, while other races were much more uniform - at least the...

I'm still learning to read! :) There's some classics up there to be sure. I'd love to see Castle Amber and Ghost Tower of Inverness.

Anyone who had parents who grew up in the depression and WW II can tall you how wrong this is. My experience of the world growing up was fundamentally different from my parents. They survived the dustbowl and the depravations of war - losing family to both. And they developed an outlook and...

It is probably a better metric to measure how many sessions a game lasts, rather than how many years. Back in the day we ran two sessions a week, minimum, and would go for 3-6 months. These days, we run twice a month if we are lucky and our campaigns tend to last about 3 years.

I know what you mean. Time will tell what becomes a classic and what doesn't. In a way, I guess Harry Potter was the "Star Wars" of its generation. Storm King is certainly a higher standard that the initial Dragon Queen modules!

Murder is not always evil. Murder is unlawful killing. The law is not always on the side of good.

Not at all. I've been proven wrong on a number of occasions by trying out house rules that I absolutely thought would not work. Enough so that I know better than to think my white-room analysis gives me an airtight conclusion on what the effect will be. The rule at my table is that we will try...

Just because you don't read current events doesn't mean that a claim is "supported by nothing". Your ignorance is not a solid argument. Again, wrong. See the number of war crimes and murders committed against invading Nazis. You seem to have many opinions anchored in a complete lack of...