For the longest time, I had no interest in painting miniatures. In an RPG, miniatures aren't essential components of the game. I've probably played as much tabletop RPG with miniantures as I have without. I've never played with miniatures in Shadowrun, for example. So when I did buy miniatures, I bo...
It's annoying that the Open Gaming License 1.0a is under attack, but it's not actually detrimental. As many people (and in fact possibly most people) recognize, you don't need anybody's permission to play a game at home, nor to write an adventure that happens to work with D&D™ 5th Edition. Don't c...
Many RPG rulebooks start out speaking in the bizarrely theoretical future tense, addressing the reader as if they were going to build a character: "First, you will choose a race, and then you will choose your skills." Then, over the course of the next few chapters, these player guides describe t...
At the time of this writing, Wizards of the Coast was attempting to unjustly, and probably unlawfully, revoke the Open Gaming License. They've recently agreed to stop that attempt, and as a sign of good faith they've released the System Reference Document (SRD) into Creative Commons. That's a minor...
Before I knew it was supposed to be hard to do it, I converted adventures from one RPG system to another on a regular basis. It started innocently enough. I'd play in someone's Tunnels & Trolls campaign, and then go home and run the same story as a D&D adventure for my friends. It never occurred t...
A unique thing about tabletop roleplaying games is that when you buy them, you're mostly just buying rules. Some rulebooks also describe in-game items, and some even come with a sample adventure tacked on at the end, but the thing you carry from game to game is a book on how to play, not what to p...
Like all tabletop games, an RPG is a group effort. As long as everyone playing the game is determined to have fun, the game goes as well as it needs to go. You might not get all the rules "right", but the game master makes rulings that work well enough for that game session, and everyone has fun. Pr...
At the time of this writing, Wizards of the Coast is continuing their attempt to revoke the Open Gaming License. It doesn't much matter, at this point, whether they succeed. They've made their intent clear. They've made it impossible to trust them as caretakers of the legacy of the world's first rol...
In a recent leaked document, Wizards of the Coast has apparently threatened to revoke the Open Gaming License version 1.0a by stating that it will become "unauthorized." From what some lawyers are saying on the Internet, because the OGL 1.0a license does not use the magic word "irrevocable," this is...
When I first got into miniature wargaming and painting, I thought all miniatures were created equal. The only difference, to me, was that some miniatures were for fantasy, others for sci fi, and still others for historical settings. But I've come to realise that miniatures vary greatly in not just c...
I've written about the RPG metagame debate before, and one contributing factor to what I'll call "metagame anxiety" is familiarity with an adventure. For the record, I don't usually mind the metagame. I believe it can be a fun and valuable part of the game. But some people get concerned that a pla...
As players level up in an RPG, they expect increased challenge. They want bigger monsters that are harder to kill and that threaten to kill them first, faster.
The formula seems like it would be simple: As player characters level-up and gain hit points, you make the monsters deal more damage. In o...
As a hobbyist game designer, I have the distinct advantages of making lots of mistakes. Mistakes are great, because you learn from them, but as a bonus you learn to see the mistakes you made in other people's designs.
Lately, the mistake I've been hyper-focused on is the lack of tags in games....
Lately I've been playing a lot of D&D online, and the games often only last for the duration of a single module. Groups come together to play through a 20 or 30 page adventure, the game lasts for a few sessions, and then ends. (My current online gaming group, admittedly, was only supposed to game to...
I was reading through a published adventure a few days ago, and noticed something odd about the way it got started. As written, the player characters are meant to wander into the game world individually, and then meet one another as they travel. The module tells the Dungeon Master to prompt each pla...
I play 5e every week, and I absolutely love it. So it may seem strange that I simultaneously believe that the 3rd edition (specifically 3.5) of D&D remains the definitive incarnation of the game.
You might think nostalgia's to blame, but in fact I have nostalgia for 2nd edition DragonLance and Pla...