What works at your table?
I often draw tabletop RPG inspiration from playing totally unrelated games. In the Pokemon game series, you can breed your Pokemon together for a variety of reasons, including learning new moves. How can we adapt this concept to make more creative monsters?
Traps can be fun. A great myth is that traps need to be carefully curated to be worth anything. While curated traps are wonderful, even simple traps can be great. Here's a simple system for running fun and impactful traps at your table: Download the PDF via DM's Guild Elements of a Good Trap For … Continue reading Simple Trap System
In last week's post on Breath Weapon Dice Pools, I suggested that you could power up the breath weapon by allowing the dragon (or other monster) to charge their breath weapon beyond its normal limits. This week, I've developed an overcharge system to drive more dynamic combat. We'll be using the Breath Weapon Dice Pools … Continue reading Breath Weapon Overcharge
Torching the whole party with a dragon's breath weapon is one of the most fun moments as a Dungeon Master. How can we tweak this rule to have greater control over its power and establish ludonarrative harmony?
Metagaming is one issue we encounter in tabletop RPGs. Players have their characters act on player knowledge that their character does not possess. A DM's defense against this is to gently remind the player to act within the confines of character knowledge. This can lead to an overcorrection where every time a single PC finds out information, the other players ask "do you tell us that?" Any time a strange routine like this becomes habitual, we should streamline the process.
Critical Hits are often the subject of homebrew rules. Driven by the perception that critical hits frequently underperform, these homebrew rules juice up the damage of critical hits to a more impressive level. They're often implemented after a player waits 20 rolls (on average) to score a critical hit that lands with a thud. But, is this underperformance a reflection of perception or reality?
Can we rewrite the Shield Master feat to fix its fiddly action economy?
We're comparing the Martial Adept feat and the Magic Initiate feat. While the effect of linear fighters vs. quadratic wizards most often manifests in class design (mostly due to spell access), there’s an interesting reflection of this design in the 5e feats, which we expect to be balanced against each other.
After last's week post calculating the success odds for the Lucky feat, some folks who run the Lucky feat a little differently asked me to run the odds on that iteration. Since this homerule is popularly employed, including by D&D Lead Rules Designer Jeremy Crawford, we're running the odds and evaluating the comparison.
Since the Druid's non-metal armor restriction is purely thematic, we're taking a close look at the rules and reskinning the metal options to give Druids access to the full armory!
