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There's been a trend for a while now in video games and anime: crafting what you kill. D&D is finally catching up. Picture courtesy of Pixabay. Dungeons & Dragons has always supported the concept of collecting stuff, with detailed inventory lists and encumbrance rules. Despite this, the...

Ha my werewolves book is in there!

This was 100% my experience, and I was the DM! We played basic rules, jumped to AD&D, were utterly confused and just sort of kept the "Basic" style of D&D without realizing the differences. We then played the AD&D modules "cold" without understanding what made sense, using tournament characters...

Wandering monsters aren't the only beings you might encounter in a dungeon; NPC adventurers can be helpful too (even unintentionally). Picture courtesy of Pixabay. Dungeons in D&D are often portrayed as desolate places, populated only by malevolent monsters. But what if these subterranean...

Yeah it's an open question as to whether any of those changes make the monster actually HARDER vs. just...different. I feel like it depends on the DM. A tactically-minded DM with access to more powerful spells in 2014 versions could do serious damage by picking the right ones, vs. 2024 where...

Off the top of my head: Monsters now can be proficient in initiative. Matters a lot, for ambush-style monsters, and listing their initiative modifier is significant. Most spellcasting monsters had their spells removed and replaced with attack actions, including one that's just an "energy bolt"...

Where goeth D&D, so goeth the industry. This doesn't mean those games aren't being played. It does mean D&D sucks up most of the oxygen in the room. On here alone, you'll see D&D news gets massively (like a factor of 20) more engagement. It just does. That doesn't make it any less important to...

This is why "The Monsters Know What They're Doing" is so popular: The Monsters Know What They’re Doing Differentiating battle tactics would be amazing, and I don't think it happens enough in D&D. Even the above series extrapolates tactics from the monster stat blocks, vs. a built-in cultural...

Ironically, that movie actually DOES show that knight doing stuff. It's quick, but he actually does trigger one of the traps, kind of explaining (vaguely), that an immortal knight keeps at least some of the traps running -- to your point the floor trap isn't something you "just reset."

It's funny because I've played through Tomb of Horrors and never remember those demons. Can they be encountered or is that a throw-away line to just explain how it resets?

In traditional D&D dungeons, traps are everywhere. But what keeps them running? Picture By George E. Koronaios - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=126583620 In the world of Dungeons & Dragons, dungeons are often steeped in magic, with traps triggered by...

What really galled me was that, like most MMORPGs at the time, the developers treated PCs like code. That is, there was no concept of matriculating new players into the mindset they wanted for their PCs, like "don't depopulate the local fauna or the ecosystem will collapse." You'll note they...

There's an entire episode of Delicious in Dungeon that's dedicated to the fact the dungeon has toilets. 🚽 Someone has to clean them. And those toilets are used to fertilize earth golems for harvesting (the golems also serve other purposes, primarily to keep powerful monsters from the lower...

I didn't touch on it in detail but this is an ongoing concern in "Delicious in Dungeon" In which there's a real worry that if the monster ecosystem collapses, the more powerful things that are kept in check in the lower levels will boil up and wipe out villages (the protagonists say this has...

So fun and weird fact is that there was a MUD discussion mailing list that at the time was the intersection of folks who administrated Multi-User Dungeons (like the game I'm still admin for, RetroMUD) and these up-and-coming MMORPGs like Ultima Online, and the UO developers were on there. We...

Megadungeons, long a staple of D&D, can be just as complex as any other ecosystem in your campaign. Picture by Thompsma - Own work, CC BY 3.0, File:TrophicWeb.jpg - Wikimedia Commons The concept of megadungeons conjures images of sprawling underground complexes filled with untold riches and...