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Are you bored with your D&D monsters being sacks of hit points with multiattacks? Are you looking for a little more tactical variety, but without making your monsters too complex? Storywise, would you like to make your boss monster a challenge without adding a bunch of minion creatures that add...

A couple of years ago, I did a Let's Read of Sword World 2.5 (SW2.5), Japan's premier fantasy role-playing game. I thought it might be interesting to bring some of the ideas that I found interesting in SW2.5 as alternatives to "standard" 5e D&D (though I think any of these could be easily...

So, when I read about ability score increases and feats being attached to Backgrounds in 2024, I was highly skeptical. One of the things I loved about Backgrounds in the 2014 rules was that they weren't mechanically relevant. Even their "ribbon" abilities were not made to interact with other...

A clip from Jon Bernthal’s podcast. Deborah Ann Woll is a deft hand. With no warning, prep, or dice, she takes Jon Bernthal through a mini-encounter that gets him thoroughly invested, and elegantly communicates the gameplay of D&D.

So, funny thing. I was procastinating taking a break from a big translation job, and started putzing around with D&D Beyond, randomly rolling up characters (4d6-drop lowest, in order) just for the fun of it. Unbeknownst to me, but beknownst to many of you, just around then a big debate broke out...

In the course of another thread, I was comparing AD&D and AD&D 2nd Edition. 2nd Edition holds a unique place in my heart. After playing D&D from 1987 to 1991, in 1992 I used the money from my first summer job to buy the core books for 2nd Edition. The original AD&D books left me a little cold...

This post was originally going to be part of the next installment in my A History of TRPGs in Japan thread, but the subject matter is so rich I felt it would be too long. And also, I think this might lead to more discussion, which might derail the History thread. There's actually a bit of info...

So if we go back to the primordial beginnings of TRPGs in Japan, if one looked around a local toy store or hobby shop in Tokyo, and that shop carried imported board games, one might have found an RPG box set or two. The box set would have been in English, so if you felt comfortable with English...

This was originally going to be part of my Let's Read of Sword World 2.5, but I thought this might be of interest even to people who haven't read that thread all the way through. Because Sword World 2.5 has some incredible starter sets that I think RPG publishers could learn from. SW 2.5 has...

When discussions about THAC0 come up, it's common for people to say something to the effect of "Why not just use Ascending AC? Why subtract? It's so weird and off-putting." And I don't really disagree, as far as THAC0 goes. It's not really that complex, and it's a perfectly cromulent system, but...

So, bopping around the internet, looking up some stuff for my Sword World thread, I came across this very interesting page. It's the website of a gaming cafe in Tokyo, and it has a ranking by year of the TRPGs selected for play in the cafe, going back to 2010. It's a wonderful snapshot of the...

Having finished a Let's Read of the rulebook that brought me into RPGs, I thought it would be interesting to do something completely new to myself, and not very well-known by the RPG community at large. Sword World! Japan's most popular fantasy role-playing RPG. My copy will actually arrive in...

This something I just have to get off my chest after watching too many D&D youtubers smugly saying, "WotC says it's not 6th Edition, but actually..." In the RPG context, and particularly the D&D context, the word "edition" is a skunked term. It's skunking began with TSR's pretty drastic...

I did a search, but I don't think these were ever discussed here. Mike Mearls and Rodney Thompson did a post-mortem on the 5th Edition design process at DigiPen Institute of Technology back in 2015. Some of the stuff is old hat by now, as information has trickled out over the years, but it's...

A little tidbit preview from the D&D Twitter feed that I hadn't seen posted yet. It gives an idea of the kinds of madness characters might encounter. Interestingly, I note that none of it is mechanical.

So I was kicking this idea around for a while, as part of my own personal retrospective on the 5e design process, and since a couple people have expressed interest in what the playtest was like, I thought I'd go ahead and do it. So this is going to be broad strokes, since there are a lot of...

Sorry, that laugh was a result of clumsy fingers on my phone.

As a lazy way to spend a Saturday, I decided to look at just how much content was available to a DM who didn't buy any of the Core Books. This first look is at Monsters, which take up the most of the free available PDFs. Just to provide a baseline, the Monster Manual provides 429(!) distinct...

After the announcement of 5th Edition in early January, 2012, our first chance to really get juicy information came later that month at the D&D Experience. There were three panels regarding Next, and an NDA-bound open playtest. The three panels were Charting the Course, with Mike Mearls, Monte...

Throughout the long playtest, there were a lot of highs and lows, moments of anticipation, and even for those excited for 5e, moments of extreme disappointment (I still miss that one iteration of the Rogue...) Of course, there were plenty of opportunities to rage-quit, and many declarations...