In D&D gods don’t intervene on your behalf,you tell them what you want, when youwant, and x times per day they’ll always listen. When you think about wizards, what pops into your head? Is it an old guy with a robe and wizard hat? A teenager that waves a wand about while spouting faux-Latin? I’m […]
If you’ve been following this blog at all, then you know what I think of 5th Edition, but just in case you haven’t here’s a very succinct recap: 5th Edition is not only more than a few steps back from 4th, but they failed to address problems that have been plaguing Dungeons & Dragons from the start. […]
I was sitting here trying to remember whether I’d received 13th Age or Numenera later, but then I remembered that technically I had purchased a copy of Dungeon World from my local store at some point after getting both. This was good, as I actually mostly enjoy this game, but then it hit me: the Starter Set. […]
3rd Edition’s bard was a big bag of poorly designed suck: your attack bonus was too low to make you a competent fighter, your hit points were on par with a rogue (whom you also had fewer skill points than), and your spellcasting was, well, to put it nicely inadequate. Some mistakenly labeled is as a […]
Just in case you came here to see if my opinion was miraculously inverted through reading a set of finalized rules that, as far as I can tell are not at all different from the last playtest packet, I will save you the time: I still think that the game looks and plays like recycled, […]
5d4 kobolds were one dayaway from retirement. I have been meaning to write this for awhile now, and I figure what with 5th Edition more or less actually out, what better time? One of the big—some might say biggest—default motivations in Dungeons & Dragons is treasure. In older editions I guess it inexplicably accounted for the […]
A lot of people are overjoyed that Wizards of the Coast is going to offer a kind of “basic” Dungeons & Dragons as a free pdf. Content-wise it is nothing special: it goes from levels 1-20 and covers the same arbitrarily “core” races and classes that you expect out a generic fantasy game. But then, did […]
I thought one of the selling points for 5th Edition was that magic items were not going to be an assumed part of the game, and that it would be entirely up to the Dungeon Master as to what, when, and where they are found. If that is still the case, then why does the […]
Before I get into the whole Mike wanting to convince us that 5th Edition has any uniquely positive traits thing, I want to address his statement that “plenty of games call themselves RPGs that don’t require or even particularly encourage roleplaying”. I understand why Mike might feel this way, because what he—and I am sure many, many others—narrowly […]
A common criticism about 5th Edition is that the designers seem more inclined to just recycle legacy mechanics—whether or not they evoke the style or “feels” that they claim to be going for—instead of actually designing rules or refining them (which has led to the derogatory title of D&D Previous): you have got Hit Dice, […]
Points of Light 