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I tried to institute that rule. Then my players called me on it in turn. I no longer institute that rule. :P

There's a comic to go with this write-up, but here by my tale. Ahem: Have any of you guys ever come close to losing a character? Or even better, have you ever come close to a TPK? If so, then you understand the strange kind of time dilation that comes along with these situations. Moments...

I have no choice but to view this sort of thing as an opportunity for worldbuilding. Case in point.

What's your technique for telegraphing the "ticking clock" to your players?

Discussion Question: Have you ever been in a game that broke your suspension of disbelief? What did it? Relevant comic for reference. Speaking for myself, I love me some genre mashups, but not when they come in out of freakin' nowhere like a burning clockwork zeppelin!

Just had a run-in with some exceptionally enticing loot last night. 5e Out of the Abyss game. During the second half of the AP there's a maguffin with the personality of the One Ring. It looks like a crazy valuable hunk of treasure, but it comes paired with a Wisdom saving throw. It draws you...

What kind of bait tends to get you?

You see the loot. You want the loot. You know it's a bad idea. Like Indie and the golden idol, however, you can't resist the siren call of treasure. I'm looking for tales from the table here. Have you ever rushed ahead to grab the goods, only to be hurt be your greed and/or impatience? What...

It's been interesting in my Out of the Abyss game. I've actually had my GM in that one hand the book across and let us study map layouts. It's a bit meta, but it does help to get the layout of an area in the way that oral description can't.

Dungeon mapping can be a challenge (relevant comic for reference). I've taken to handing players cut up bits of map as they go, allowing them to piece it back together with tape. It has the added advantage that they can draw out dungeon rooms while I prep the other parts of combat, but you lose...

Here's a copy + paste from the Facebook page my every-other-week megadungeon uses. There are seven players, but I'll game with as few as two. When it comes to the vote, the first tiebreaker goes to players that missed the most recent session. Second tiebreaker goes to players with the lowest...

Game night is coming. Two of your five players have cancelled. What do you do? Relevant comic for reference.

What about natural allies though? I'm thinking friendly NPCs like that intelligent gelatinous cube from Out of the Abyss.

I would like to feel self-conscious about my behir bro as a bonus action. :(

Do any of you guys capture and train monsters to serve as your allies? Gelatinous cubes as garbage disposals? Fire elementals for central heating? How does that tend to work out at the table? Relevant comic for reference.

That is exactly the tradeoff I'm worried about. You've got things like 5e's bless and bardic inspiration to provide different styles of bonus to a roll, but the system can feel a bit cramped at times. It begins to make me wonder whether that's part of the reason for its comparatively slow...

I've got a short post over here running a compare / contrast on the 5e D&D advantage / disadvantage system versus the more granular modifiers found in older editions like Pathfinder. It seems to me that there's a question of elegance on the one hand versus depth on the other. As such, I'm...

The perils of converting from 3.X. Cheers!

There's a question of volume though, you know? When you find a cash of a half dozen vials, it begins to feel a lot less like treasure when you've got to blow a 100 gp pearl with every casting.

Do you guys ever run into trouble identifying potions and poisons? Is there a better method of identification that the extremely risky taste test? Comic for illustrative purposes.