How do you breathe life into a campaign world? It’s a question with a thousand, rambling answers. Here’s one of them.

The title is a lie. I’m the complete idiot and this feature will not help anyone run a good Play by Post game. I’m just giving a very long, rambling, overly detailed response to a very simple question I had no business answering. Really… don’t read this.

There’s this argument that rages all over the internet about whether it’s offensive for players to suggest to others what they should do and whether it’s okay for players to bring suboptimal characters to the team and I want to explain why everyone’s wrong and you’re all asshats.

Last time, I told you why you shouldn’t try to run an open-world campaign based on your favorite open-world video game and that you can’t. This time I’m telling you why you don’t have to.

Every time a new open-world video game comes out — or gets updated with DLC — I get inundated with emails claiming that game finally did open-world gaming right and how we should model all our TTRPG campaigns every on it. Please stop.

Someone once asked me, “Is game balance worth a damn?” I don’t remember who or why or when, but I remember the question. And now I’m gonna rant an answer.

To bring the Character Arc-Pocalypse to a close, today I’m writing about Character Arcs. For real this time.

Thanks to a courageous remark by a Frienemy in my Discord server, I finally have my New Year’s Post. And to show my respect and gratitude, I shall now proceed to piss all over that remark.

Thanks to Frienemy-for-Life Mendel, I get to cancel myself by talking about what “always evil” means, how it’s different for orcs and devils, and why both are good for the game. Whee!

All I wanted to do was clarify myself. I didn’t mean to end up rambling about what playstyles mean and where they come from and whether it’s time to add another letter to our favorite playstyle acronym.

“Angry,” everyone keeps asking me, “how can I fix D&D’s shallow-seeming, boring combat?” Well, here’s your answer: “You can’t! But maybe you shouldn’t!”

Sometimes, all it takes is one remark to set me off. And this time, I saw one remark about how to handle illusions. I didn’t read the actual remark or the hours of discussion around it, but I have opinions nonetheless.

Now that I’ve explained Macrochallenges — whether you understood them or not — I can finally defend a choice I made years ago that many of you still haven’t forgiving: why I stopped calling Non-Encounters Scenes.

In today’s ranty bullshit screed, I declare myself the winner of three different arguments about Hacking.

I really effed up that Attrition Macrochallenge thing, didn’t I? Don’t think so? Well, all the questions and comments I’m dealing with certainly say I did. So let me try that shit again.

It’s Random Bullshit time. Today, I’m bullshitting about challenge, difficulty, stupid game masters, and why attrition is the most brilliant mechanic ever invented.

Just a little digression about magic: detecting it, identifying it, and why D&D’s answers to what can be detected are stupid as hell.

You know what players love? Discovering secrets. You know what GMs and game designers hate? Players discovering secrets. That’s kind of messed up; don’t you think?

I ain’t a reviewer or a critic. I don’t trash things for easy laughs. I don’t do tier rankings. And I don’t do clickbait lists. In that spirit, he’s my list of the Five Best and Five Worth Things About D&D 3.5.

Hot take: fumble mechanics are more valuable than crit mechanics. In fact, crits are only valuable if the monsters are rolling them. But I’m only proving one of those things today.

When it comes to explaining roleplaying games, there’s a giant, glaring question no one seems to be able to sufficiently and properly answer. And that is: just what the hell does it mean to be a Game Master. And really, that’s the first question anyone must answer before they can teach anyone else how to run games.

There’s this discussion that happens anytime anyone brings up death, failure, and loss in RPGs online. About how RPG systems should be better at handling failure because it’s so vital in RPGs. And that discussion… is wrong.

Let’s complain about a how a twelve-year-old game’s brilliant ideas were marred by the language used to communicate them. Because that’s a GOOD use of my time.