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It’s easy to think of your players as inattentive, unwitting goofs that miss important details to their own detriment. After all, there's a reason that "the three clue rule" is a thing. Players are guaranteed to blow up the first clue before misinterpreting the second. They need the extra...

Hate it when I screw that up. Fixed.

Your trusted ally has turned to the dark side, and is now trying to kick your ass. They’ve got all the powers of a fully equipped PC, they’re already in the party’s backfield, and you’ve got to snap ’em out of it. In this situation, what is the best anti-dominate strat? And if you happen to be...

Man... Beating your enemies with your enemies seems to be a major theme. I wonder if it's possible to build a subclass around that?

You ever play Vermintide II? One of the weekly events has strong enemies split into weaker ones upon death. Suddenly crowd control becomes hugely important.

At my own table, the award went to comic related. The clever monk thought to ask what manner of food was filling up the vampire's banquet table. The vamp got "steaked," and we lost our collective naughty word. Can you do better? What is the best improvised weapon you've ever seen in play?

I quite like the "level of humor" piece. I find that the funny works well when it's one joke and done. It's the derailment into 10-minute long side conversations that gets really old. That mess makes it almost impossible to progress.

Tonal whiplash has always been a struggle for me. Moving from serious-face quasi-Shakespearean language to fart jokes and sexual innuendo kind of comes with the gaming territory. Even so, I can't help but find it jarring when the stoic and honorable paladin begins quipping about his "rod of...

Isn't that the history prof from Harry Potter? ... It totally is! https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Cuthbert_Binns

Desecrated burial grounds... Echoes of violent emotion... Powerful creatures with unfinished business... It seems like there are a million and one ways for an adventuring party to accidentally create their own undead antagonist. In that spirit, I turn to the board with this question: What are...

We’ve all heard about X-Cards and Session Zero tone setting, but I'm curious about how this mess works out in the wild. In your own games, when it comes time to extract information from the hostages, how grimdark do you go? And even beyond the question of torture, how much of the bleak amoral...

Yup. That's more or less the issue. BMX can RP the heck out of his street-level crime fightin' powers. But at some point there is a very real exchange rate between mechanical agency and narrative agency.

Consider the humble monk. Here's a class that puts in time, discipline, and strenuous martial training to earn his fantasy super power. Ki and stunning strike and elemental disciplines set him apart from common folk, and make him something extraordinary within the fiction of the game world. When...

I always have trouble with this when I'm running a companion class. On the one hand, I want my horse-bro to contribute to the team. On the other, I don't want to stunt my own progression. A 50/50 split on gear probably isn't the right answer. There’s a difference between PC and NPC after all...

WTF is happening in this anecdote? I have no idea whether that was a creative writing exercise or a cry for help.

The hardest part of this hobby isn't digesting massive rules tomes. It isn't slaying gods. It isn't even learning to pronounce "melee" correctly. It's finding the right group. It's kind of a weird comparison, but I think the first session is a lot like a first date. You aren’t committing to a...

Learning that it's OK to break out of the "character frame" and check in on the "actual human beings at the table frame" is a good skill to model. Especially for newer players.

If you've ever DM'd for new players, you've probably run into some poor gaming etiquette. I'm talking about stealing from the party, murdering allied NPCs, and other general acts of murder-hoboism. The common wisdom is to impose logical consequences: the NPCs become hostile; bounty hunters come...

Really sucks when you need to cut that rope bridge and only have a light crossbow.

Disarming happens. Thieves happen. Rust monsters happen. And when these things happen, it's a good idea to have fallback option hanging at your hip. And so, in the interest of never again resorting to non-proficient unarmed strikes against a boss monster, what is your go-to backup weapon? This...