My current Dungeon Master loves designing scenarios that feature the alarm spell. Currently we’re sneaking around a dragon’s lair complex for the second time… having triggered an alarm the first time, lost the element of surprise and been forced to beat an undignified retreat. On our second attempt we’ve been casting detect magic a lot […]
Category: Running The Game (Page 1 of 4)
I’ve seen even experienced Game Masters resort to railroading at the gaming table. Hell, I’ve been guilty of it myself, and on more than one occasion. But why would any GM stoop that low, when pretty much the one thing that everyone in this hobby agrees upon is that “railroading is bad”? Contrary to what […]
I’ve tried to fix falling in D&D twice already. Maybe, I even succeeded. But since I wasn’t able to recall my own house rules during a recent session, without looking them up, they don’t quite fulfil my twin needs of being a) more realistic than the official rules but also b) being simple enough to […]
Over the course of 2025, I’ve seen multiple bloggers and Youtubers attempt to fix D&D 5.5’s new hiding rules. While these are all folks I respect, most of their revisions ended up as 2,000+ word treatises full of technical jargon that made me want to reach for the Ibuprofen more than my gemstones. So, as […]
In my last post I talked about the maxim: “rulings, not rules”. Living by this maxim can drastically speed up your game, as making a quick ruling about a situation and getting on with the game is obviously far faster than poring through the handbooks and trying to reach consensus on the “correct” way to […]
Despite starting my RPG journey with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in the late 80s, I have almost zero nostalgia for the early days of D&D. It was fun at the time, but laboriously making my way through an improbable dungeon, prodding every square inch of stone with a 10-foot-pole for traps, all so I can […]
Adventurers wanting to break down a door is a really common scenario in D&D, but one that can be surprisingly hard to adjudicate, especially when the players are under no time pressure. The desire to transform a door into shards of timber typically occurs when the rogue fails their Dexterity check with thieves’ tools, leading […]
I finished running my first ever D&D “intrigue” adventure recently. Since a) it went pretty well and b) it was quite a different adventuring experience to our usual sessions, I thought it would make a good topic for a blog post. A while back I tried to categorise all the possible Dungeons & Dragons quest […]
Of all the posts I see on Reddit, RPG forums and social media requesting advice on running 5e D&D, DMs asking their peers for tips on how to speed up combat are by far the most frequent. It seems to be a real bugbear of many DMs. And while the usually solid advice given in […]
Legendary Resistances are one of 5e’s most unsatisfying mechanics. They are an incredibly blunt solution that the designers had to include to counter the many annoying spells they let in the door of the 2014 Player’s Handbook (…and indeed the 2024 version too). Wheeling out banishment or polymorph on a wandering monster might be a […]
