Campaign Mastery

For a long time, I’ve been dissatisfied with the way some games handle wild, improbable, luck. D&D, for example, has no luck mechanism per se; only the critical hits subsystem comes close, where if you roll well enough, you score multiple damage, and in the skills subsection, whereby rolling a 20 on a skill check […]

Some mistakes you (hopefully) only make once; the mistakes that I’ve blogged about so far as part of this month’s carnival fall into that category. But some mistakes are bound to recur by their nature, and it is just as important to know how to recover from those. These mistakes might derive from a flawed […]

How do you extrapolate from existing rules to cover new situations? Recently, Campaign Mastery was asked, If a giant has rapid shot can he throw 2 rocks in a full round action? (d&d 3.5) This sparked some debate over whether Campaign Mastery should answer rules questions of this sort; we aim to deal with big-picture […]

In a previous blog, I discussed converting prices from “…and a 10-Foot Pole” from I.C.E. and mentioned a number of campaign-related issues and background elements from “Fumanor: The Last Deity” that complicated the discussion, which I promised to tell everyone about at another time. Since it’s a good example of how to take a rules […]

It doesn’t take much more than a quick flip through the pages of “…And A 10-foot Pole” to realise that it’s an extensively-researched volume. Aside from breaking history into twelve periods covering everything from the stone age (prior to 9000 BC) to the information age (1980+), it divides commodities into standardised categories and gives prices […]

Part 1 of this blog post listed nine general supplements. Parts 2, 3, and 4 added three planar supplements, four supplements about magic, and four supplements about game settings and gaming environments. That makes a full twenty-count by my tally. This fifth part is all about honourable mentions: supplements that didn’t make the final list, […]

Someone once asked me why D&D bothers to include skills at all. After all, the GM generally tells the players anything they really need to know (rather than seeing all his hard work in preparing the game crash and burn); and even if he doesn’t, players can always take a twenty. After further discussion, this […]

In Part 1 of this blog post, I described nine general supplements which have been useful to me multiple times in multiple campaigns. In this second part, I add another eleven must-have supplements. I should explain that this top twenty are not presented in any sort of ranking – they were originally listed (along with […]

In the comments to a recent blogpost (“The More Things Change: An essay on the future of RPGs”) that I wrote, Johnn suggested that he’d like to see a list of my top twenty D&D supplements. It wasn’t easy, but I finally narrowed the choice down to a mere 20 choices – with an additional […]

This isn’t the blog post that I intended to make this week; unfortunately, I’ve been struck down by the ‘flu and had no time to get anything finished except for something that I’ve been able to recycle from my house rules for the various D&D campaigns that I run. That’s also why I’m posting a […]

This month’s RPG Bloggers carnival is themed on D&D. The guest article below by Mike E. has some great ideas for modifying your D&D experience by borrowing what he likes from one edition and adding it to another. I’d like to think I’m a fairly good DM. I know I have my strengths, and I […]

The Roleplay of Prestige Classes My games normally enforce the roleplay (non-game-mechanics) requirements for Prestige Classes (and, where relevant, feats and level progressions). It’s not enough for the character (PC or NPC) to simply meet the prerequisites, they usually have to DO something. Pages 204-205 of DMG II, in discussing the design of new prestige […]