What works at your table?
5th Edition D&D players often lament the exploration pillar as the most underdeveloped tier of play, behind the combat and social pillars. While there are great tools for fleshing out your world in the core materials, they lack mechanical bite. We're here to give those narrative elements some mechanical teeth with Exploration Dice.
Once upon a time, a character came across a shrine deep within an abandoned Dwarven stronghold carved deep into the Iron Mountains. Struck by reverence to the shrine of the lost deity Dumathoin, he knelt and prayed. So his character changed forever. I worked with the player to create a Paladin subclass devoted to the … Continue reading Oath of Secret Knowledge (Paladin)
Diving into Wizards of the Coast's latest Unearthed Arcana offering for a look at the Magic Reserves class feature and how you can turn your Barbarian into an infinite mana battery!
How long can a sahuagin live in a water-filled Bag of Holding?
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
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?
Shortly after the release of The Artificer Returns, we ran a survey asking D&D fans some more general design questions than you get from the typical Unearthed Arcana survey. Here's the results!
We used to build characters a different way. Back in 3.x, the splat got so numerous that you were practically forced to "work backwards from 20." In other words, you would build your ultimate character concept and work backwards to see what you needed to take at each level. For example, failure to properly plan … Continue reading Design Tips: Trap Features
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?
ThinkDM 