COMING SOON! -- Archetype Anthology: A Dozen Archetypes for D&D 5th Edition on Kickstarter! From dual-wielding tempests to planar explorers -- a softcover collection of new archetypes for your 5th Edition game!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8091919" data-attributes="member: 6779196">My feeling on them during 4e was that “the best thing you can say about them is that they don’t suck if your players don’t know they’re happening.” It wasn’t until the 5e playtest that I came across a guide to running them (that I think was written by [USER=97077]@iserith[/USER]?) But by then I was like “eh, I won’t need them in 5e.”I don’t blame you. He takes like six articles to explain a system that amounts to:Add a d6 to a visible pool of dice whenever a player takes a time-consuming action. Roll all the dice currently in the pool whenever a player takes a risky action (do both if the action is both risky and time-consuming). If you would add a die to the pool when there are already six dice in it, instead roll them all and then empty the pool. Any time you roll the pool, a complication occurs if any dice come up on a 1. This works for basically any situation with mounting tension, by giving a players a visual representation of that tension building up, and making the risk of complications build, climax, and then fall. It can also be used to track time, with each die representing roughly 10 minutes in the dungeon, or roughly 4 hours overland. In this case, you also add a die whenever the appropriate amount of time passes in game.</blockquote>