19th Level

Back in 2015 I gave my first impressions of the 5th edition of D&D. Beyond that brief campaign I haven't clocked much 5th edition time but my impressions remain - it's a great game. It takes a number of lessons learned from the 3rd and 4th editions of the game. Here's my big takeaways on the 5th edition. First, it takes away the necessity of 3.x games to very carefully balance encounters and to plan player characters from first level. It removed the "grind" often found in D&D 4th edition and stepped back from a number of decisions made in there that made the game feel less like D&D. One interesting lesson it took from 4th edition was a "proficiency bonus". When making a roll in something core to your character you add it to your d20 roll, otherwise you don't. A fighter would add it to attack rolls with his sword, a wizard would apply it to her spell rolls. Any character would use it for skills he or she is proficient in. It applies...

One of the oddities in this list is variants of D&D will appear multiple times while games like Call of Cthulhu  will appear once. However, I've found many of the editions of D&D are extremely different from one another. If you showed up at my Call of Cthulhu 7th edition game with a 1st edition character, we could probably convert on the fly. On the other hand, bringing a D&D 3.5 character to a 4th edition game would not work. Additionally, there will be a few retro-clones on this list - primarily if they bring something very new to the gable. While D&D 3.0 and D&D 3.5 do have some fair-sized differences, it is clear that 3.5 is an evolution from 3.0 as opposed to an entirely new game, as was done in 4e. It was tough for me to figure out where D&D 3.x should rank. I want to point out that any game on this list is a game I've both played and enjoyed - and there are a few games not on the list that I've also enjoyed quite a bit. The 3rd ed...

I gave a lot of thought as to whether to include the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons on my list. Of all the games on my list it's probably the one I have the most issues with. On the other hand, I really like a number of ideas that the designers of D&D 4e tried to do. They took some chances, broke a number of "sacred cows of D&D". Looking back, I think Wizards of the Coast would have been better off making D&D 4e a separate/non-D&D game. though I can understand not wanting to have products competing with each other. What I really liked about D&D 4e was the way it gave all classes a bunch of interesting abilities - some usable at-will, some usable on a per-encounter basis, some usable daily. Characters had different roles which greatly influenced how they'd handle things in combat - some characters were great at slugging it out with multiple opponents, others dancing all over the battlefield. All the classes managed to feel interesting an...

Grok means "to understand," of course, but Dr. Mahmoud, who might be termed the leading Terran expert on Martians, explains that it also means, "to drink" and "a hundred other English words, words which we think of as antithetical concepts. 'Grok' means all of these. It means 'fear,' it means 'love,' it means 'hate'—proper hate, for by the Martian 'map' you cannot hate anything unless you grok it, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you—then you can hate it. By hating yourself. By this implies that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise. Then you can hate—and (I think) Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called mild distaste.  Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land  introduces the term "grok" which is a bit difficult to understand - I've always viewed it as a full and total understandi...

It's a little late to be doing a review of D&D 5th edition. Be that as it may, I recently ran my first 5th edition game and it seemed a reasonable topic to give my first impressions of it. This isn't a full review - a little googling will find a few gazillion of those. First, some background. Earlier in the year we played some Dungeon Crawl Classics. It was a blast, at least until the total party kill. I'd gladly play again, but I felt free to allow my GM ADD to reign. We played Fantasy Flight Games' Star Wars: Edge of the Empire. It's a game I enjoyed, but it's a bit of a mental shift from other game which had me doing a lot of legwork as GM. With me beginning my long delayed (part-time) pursuit of a Master's Degree this fall I wanted something that didn't require quite as much prep work. After some back and forth we kicked off a 5th edition D&D game set on Eberron. So one of the goals of 5th edition D&D, as I understand it, was to b...

I like tech toys a lot - well enough to have gotten rather proficient at selling older items on eBay to help feed my habit for new items that sane people are perfectly happy waiting for... Oddly, one area I find myself turning to some vintage technology is when I need to record my thoughts. Both in hobbies and at work I find myself making use of pen and paper as my preferred way of doing so. It's not that I'm uncomfortable with more modern methods - for example in my family we use tools Google Calendar and Google Keep as tools to keep track of everyone's activities and to maintain shopping and todo lists. When I'm at my local supermarket I'll have my cell phone in hand clicking off items as I put them in my shopping cart. However, when it comes time to recording my thoughts, I've not found a good replacement for pen and paper. I've tried a number of them and I am quite fond of my Microsoft Surface Pro 3 with it's active pen. My usual workflow is to r...

This posting, I think, is a quick one. And it's not even a house rule anymore though at the time it was... Back in the 90s, I think in the Usenet group rec.games.frp.dnd though it might have been in Dragon magazine, I read about the idea of allowing first level D&D characters to start with maximum hit points. It's normal nowadays but at the time the official rule was at first level you started with random hit points. This was an idea I really liked and made use of, though I'm trying to remember if we really ever allowed first level fighters to go adventuring with just one or two hit points. But the rule did protect magic-users from angry housecats. Simple, easy to implement, and greatly improving the game, everything a house rule should be.

I'm going to narrow this down a bit to cover settings just created for a game and exclude licensed settings and slightly modified versions of Earth. As someone who gamed back when old school stuff was new, I remember the original versions of settings like TSR's Forgotten Realms. My default game setting was usually World of Greyhawk. I'd still gladly set games there. That said, I really enjoyed Wizards of the Coast's Eberron Campaign Setting, especially in its original incarnation. It really hit a lot of criteria that I enjoy. It didn't feel like a world that had no room for the players to do important things. It took place in the aftermath of a major war with a strong feeling another one is coming, giving a bit of the feel you get in 1920s/1930s Earth with high action, airships, and lightning rail trains. It had an awesome fantasy city, the city of Sharn, something like a miniature medieval Coruscant. It did a great job creating realms with interesting rulers,...

Eek there's like too many of these... I'm going to go over some of the games I've played before zero-ing in on a favorite. Once upon a time I had a blast with a D&D 3.5 game in the Eberron campaign setting. I'm going to say that D&D 3.5 was a blast to play. However, in terms of running the game, especially with regard to prep work, I found it a bit cumbersome. I played some D&D 4e and generally enjoyed it but it felt a bit different from other D&D games and we did run into the dreaded "grind" where the outcome a combat is clear several rounds before it ends. I've also done some RuneQuest - the second incarnation of the Mongoose version. It's pretty similar to the current incarnation. I enjoyed the give and take of RuneQuest combat and the straightforward skills system. I've only done one full campaign with that, a rather enjoyable fantasy Vikings meeting Lenape in Manhattan. In more recent games I used Dungeon Crawl Classics...

Aaron Allston passed away this past week. Allston was a prodigious game designer and author. In the roleplaying world he was best known for his work for Hero Games, TSR, along with Ghostbusters International for West End Games. He later moved on to producing fiction, best known for writing several well-received novels set in the Star Wars universe. For many in the gaming world he is best known for his Hero Games work but I was most familiar with his work for TSR, most notably being the force behind three of the most noteworthy D&D products of the late 80s and early 90 (along with several other products he wrote): GAZ1: The Grand Duchy of Karameikos (1987) Dungeons & Dragons Hollow World (1990) Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia (1991) The Grand Ducky of Karakeikos  was a detailed look at the default starting area of play in the D&D "known world" (later renamed Mystara). The Hollow World  gave us a good measure of pulp with the lost civilizations o...

Though I began gaming in the 80s the 90s proved to be very formative in my gaming style. I absolutely ate up story-based games like Vampire: The Masquerade  as well as the story-based style seen in D&D 2nd Edition products. One of the frequent elements of that style is not letting the dice get in the way of the story. I'm not going to bash that gaming style - I had a lot of fun gaming that way, playing through the Forgotten Realms Avatar-trilogy of adventures and managing to have a great time, despite its strong element of rail roading. It's a style and if everyone is having fun with it then there's nothing wrong with it. One of the dangers with that style is players can turn into spectators or actors for a story designed by the GM (or a pre-packaged adventure). You'll have villains who absolutely cannot be killed in the first encounter, events that must happen no matter what the players do. One of the innovations I've seen over the last decade is game sy...

One thing I've noticed is the D&D products of the 1970s seem awfully different from the material produced now. Not totally - looking through the material that companies like the Judges Guild and TSR produced, adventures have always been popular. (Though the adventures of the day were a lot more open/easy to drop into a campaign.) But what I see is a lot of products designed as resources for Dungeon Masters. You had your Monster & Treasure Assortments and Dungeon Geomorphs. Judges Guild produced a gazillion products with dungeon and wilderness maps, random encounters, etc. As I'm prepping my first "real" sandbox style game I have to confess I see the utility in them. Not knowing precisely what the players will do has me going through my not inconsiderable gaming library (stretching, if not back to the 1970s, at least to the 80s - when a lot of those old products were still in print). Lots of adventures I've used in the past seem just perfect for locat...

Earlier this week Wizards of the Coast announced  they would be reprinting the original edition of Dungeons & Dragons, the famed "white box".  This set will consist of the following: Volume 1: Men & Magic Volume 2: Monsters & Treasure Volume 3: Underworld & Wilderness Adventures Supplement I: Greyhawk Supplement II: Blackmoor Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry Supplement IV: Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes I first started playing with the " magenta box " version of the D&D Basic Game. Prior to this the Advanced D&D Game, the "blue box" Basic Game, and Original Edition were released. AD&D 1st edition was still very active and would be for years to come; it was the game we probably played most in the early 80s though by the late 80s I'd switched to science fiction games. It wasn't till years later that I managed to get copies of the Original Edition and blue box version of the Basic Game. I also have PDFs of all...

D&D Expert Rules 1st-3rd Printings D&D Expert Rules 4th+ Printing The product I'm reviewing here isn't quite the Expert Set that had the most popularity. The better known version is a heavily revised version with a cover drawn by Larry Elmore (on the right). The version I began with has the Erol Otus cover featuring a wizard observing the scene that was on the cover of the original D&D Basic Rules. Back when Wizards of the Coast offered legal PDF downloads only the 4th+ Printing was made available. I really wish Wizards of the Coast would make a reprint of this version, digital or physical, available. Overview As has been my habit we'll begin with an overview of what we get in the book. I won't be going in as much detail as I did in my review of the Basic Rules as many portions of this are simply an expansion of what has come before. Part 1 - Introduction The Expert Rules begin with a description of what this book covers. It expects that...

Examining my history with D&D I find it interesting to notice some of the products that I missed. For whatever reason, my early gaming was entirely devoid of any Judges Guild products. Judges Guild was one of the first (maybe the first) licensed 3rd party publisher for D&D. They produced lots of supplements, from settings to adventures to reference charts. For whatever reason, I never encountered any of their products. A number of their products are available for download at RPGNow, though to be honest, the quality of their scans is pretty horrible. I've been occasionally sweeping up reasonably priced physical copies of their books that I find online. Recently I acquired their Caves and Caverns product. It is described as "Forty-Eight Caves & Caverns with Nine Pages of Charts & Guidelines using the City State Campaign Hexagon System." With that description I was expecting something resembling TSR's Dungeon Geomorphs. Their mention of the Campai...

On a recent Google+ conversation I found myself discussing what makes an "old school" D&D game. Part of the conversation involved whether throttling back character abilities is what makes something old school. For example, in AD&D your magic-user can cast a single 1st level spell once per day at first level. He might have as few as 1 hit point and can wear no armor nor master the weapons of a fighter. In the 3rd edition of D&D your 1st level wizard may have multiple spells per day with high intelligence, is guaranteed to start off with at least 4 hit points (barring low constitution), can wear armor if he wants to risk spell failure, can learn how to use fighter weapons, etc. Moving on to 4th edition this wizard at 1st level now has an unlimited amount of magic missiles available to him. Clearly character abilities, especially at low levels, is something that has increased with newer editions of the game. I'd argue that is certainly part of what one finds in...

D&D Basic Magenta Box For me D&D began with the "magenta box" version of the D&D Basic rules. My next door neighbor received it for Christmas, it having become available at Toys R Us and similar stores. During one snow day I was flipped through it and was hooked - to be honest, I was also confused as heck, as were most people who were introduced to it via the rules and without other people teaching them. I'm not certain how typical my experience was - learning the game by figuring it out on my own. Unfortunately Wizards of the Coast no longer has its old D&D PDFs available for sale - and even when they did they did not have this version for sale - they had the later "red box" Basic set and the previous "blue box" Basic set. To be honest, the red box is probably a better introduction to the rules but I prefer the atmosphere of the purple box. D&D Basic Red Box D&D Basic Blue Box \ ...