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So there we were, playing our 5th edition Greyhawk campaign, when we veer off topic and start chatting about fantasy movies from the 1980s. Player #5: I liked Conan the Destroyer better than Conan the Barbarian. Player #4: Agreed. Me: What the $#@%? Player #1: Yeah, what the $#@%...

In the early 90s, there was a little magazine published for Cyberpunk 2020 called Interface. It was a quarterly magazine that introduced new cyberware, weapons, drugs, NPCs, organizations, etc., etc. to use in your Cyberpunk game. In 1991, Peter Christian wrote an article for Interface called...

In my last session, the player characters defeated an adult black dragon and it was a lot of fun. At the end of our session, I told them I'd figure out something fun to do with the corpse. And by fun, I mean let's make some magic items. So think of what parts of the dragon you might use to...

Inspired by the threads What Does a "Successful" RPG Look Like and Jason Carl on White Wolf's Return, Mage: The Ascension Plans, @Ruin Explorer got me to thinking. Just looking back and the sheer number of books published for various games in the 80s, 90s, and into the 2000s, my perception is...

Yeah, it's a contentious title, but we're living in a post-social media world where click bait titles are how you get views. But let's start from the beginning. Is combat in 5th edition tedious? After a few weeks of running it with the players moving from levels 1 through 4, I can safely say...

I've seen various sources saying most D&D campaigns end by the time the characters are between levels 7-10. Assuming this is true, why bother with levels 11-20? Okay, I get it. Assuming most campaigns go no higher than 10, there are still some people who do have campaigns that go that high...

I have a player with a character concept a bit outside the norm. He's playing a Druid, and his intention is to have a pet animal that does the direct fighting while he sits in the back and casts supportive spells. If you've ever played World of Warcraft, this sounds an awful lot like one of...

My long term group has faced some challenges the last few years with two people moving to another country and one moving into hospice. Player A went ahead and recruited two of his board gaming buddies, players B and C. Players B and C weren't bad people, but they really weren't all that...

I am to Monks as Snarf is to Bards. And just so we're clear, I have an intense dislike for them in the context of most D&D settings. I rather like them in places like Legend of the Five Rings or Kar-Tur. It's like someone tried to shoehorn Kwai Chang Caine from Kung-Fu* into D&D and it's...

I'm about to start a 5th edition Greyhawk campaign. In the first scenario, the PCs take on an organization, the Ordo Ventricula Sanctus, a group of villainous monks dedicated to becoming one with the universe through gastronomical exploration. The PCs should run across one of their storage...

Let's get this out of the way. Of course it depends on the setting, the PCs culture, and what they do for a living. But how are they dressed compared to the average person in the campaign? In the default D&D campaign, the player characters are adventurers, or weirdos as I like to call them...

So back in the 1990s and the early 2000s, there were a few RPG companies who had their own outreach/ambassador programs. This was basically a system where volunteers would run a company's games at store events or conventions and in exchange they'd get free stuff or other considerations. There...

I ran a campaign recently that was not to the liking of one of my players. Instead of talking to me about it directly, he had his character behave in a disruptive manner just to stir the pot, he made passive aggressive complaints, and when he had to replace his character introduced a new one...

We've currently got a thread going ranking the best horror movies of all time. Let's talk about the best horror RPGs of all time. Criteria? Look, I don't really like to get bogged down in discussions of what is or isn't horror. If you want to tell me Burrows & Bunnies is a horror game...

D&D has almost always had an adventure treadmill. Characters go adventuring, they gain experience and treasure, become more powerful, and go out to repeat the whole process until they run out of levels. Good times. Way back in the old days, you you needed to spend your hard earned gold to...

I have a pathological aversion to third party products designed to be compatible with D&D. When I go to the local game store, if I'm considering a product for use with D&D I won't look at anything that hasn't been published by WotC. I say it's a pathological aversion because my most favorite...

I'm old, but I'm not that old, so I don't really know where people were buying D&D back in the 1970s. By the early 1980s, AD&D products were available through mainstream retailers. You could go to the mall and find AD&D books at Kaybee Toy, B. Dalton Booksellers, and I don't know if Sears...

A relatively minor complaint I have about 5th edition is having to wait until third level to get my subslcass. In a few of the D&D campaigns I've run, players have wanted to skip to level three because "that's when it gets fun." One of the reasons we wait until third level to get our subclass...

Once upon a time, in a kingdom far, far away, lived a little boy who really enjoyed poring over equipment lists, especially those with dozens upon dozens of polearms, deciding how best to spend my gold on equipment. Lucerne hammer or glaive. You better believe Lucerne. I don’t have enough for a...

It pains me to say this, but I don't think most players care about game settings all that much. It pains me to admit this because I'm someone who really loves settings, and who chooses what games to run primarily based on how much I like the setting (I'm not looking at you Shadowrun). Most...