My first takeaway from Journeys through the Radiant Citadel is the futility of pre-ordering the latest D&D releases on Amazon. I enjoyed Candlekeep Mysteries and was, if anything, more excited for this anthology, but despite buying the book in June and expecting it on my doorstep in July, after a couple of false starts, it […]
With the disclaimer that I’ve never played a monk in 5th edition, from my experience watching others play them, plus following the general online discourse around them, it seems clear to me that the class has issues. They are a martial class that is both brittle and struggles to do any serious damage… and that […]
“This … showcases one of the problems I have with D&D. … the fact that the martial melee weapon category includes just about every type of weapon ever created … there are vastly different techniques in using a greatsword vs using a whip vs a warhammer vs a glaive vs a meteor hammer.” These are […]
It’s been voted the best fight in cinema history… and if you’re fresh from watching Kill Bill recently, then you probably finished the film with a (violent?) urge to play Gogo Yubari on a Dungeons & Dragons table very soon. The only problem is… the meteor hammer (an ancient Chinese weapon) doesn’t exist in D&D. […]
In general teleportation works pretty well in Dungeons & Dragons. At low levels, when the characters don’t have access to spells like teleportation circle, journeys are arduous and fraught with danger. Then, at mid-to-high levels, when the party have exhausted that style of play, and their characters can’t be challenged by bandits, broken bridges and […]
When I wrote DRAGONBOWL, I needed to imagine a transport infrastructure that would allow the gladiatorial festival to ‘pop up’ in locations around Faerun, including in a massive cavern in Mount Waterdeep – and that infrastructure meant a lot of teleportation. As I tried to fathom out how to recreate ‘sci-fi’ style teleportation stations in […]
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, players controlling steeds, sidekicks, pets or summoned creatures on the D&D battlefield is a bit of pet peeve of mine. I don’t like it when one player has dramatically more ‘screen time’ than all the others (like most players, whether they admit it or not, I get more satisfaction […]
After watching Treantmonk’s superb subclass ranking series I was excited when the rules-savvy vlogger published a video in which he claimed to ‘fix D&D’ with just three house rules. I was left absolutely flabbergasted when the first of these rules was to remove the shield spell from the game! Wtf? If I was going to […]
As discussed on a recent blog post, I don’t like Sneak Attack too much as a mechanic, for a variety of reasons (mostly related to balance and credibility). Wary of attempting an extensive rewrite of this rather fundamental feature, I concluded that post with a simple House Rule which I will be testing out in […]
So with new versions of the Dungeons & Dragons core rulebooks scheduled for release in 2024, I thought it might be fun to have my say on what I’d like ‘6th edition D&D’ to look like, just in case the game’s designers are frantically scouring the Internet for any last minute inspiration and insights by […]
