No, characters do not break down doors and every time you let your players say they do, you ruin my game design. Stop it.

I ran a crappy encounter and rather than accept the blame, I’m going to blame not just the system, but the fundemental underlying fabric of all roleplaying gaming ever. And I’m not even going to solve the problem. Happy Thanksgiving.

Time for me to be a cranky old grognard and yell about modern technology again. Except, actually, that’s not what I’m going to do at all. I mean, I am going to yell, and I am going to be cranky, but it won’t be what you think.

In this throwback to my classic Up Your GMing Level style advice, I provide a simple… ish way to adjudicate and narrate protracted, time-consuming actions that don’t need a bunch of moment-by-moment gameplay.

This is a nasty, ugly, mean-spirited rant but lots of you need to hear it. Let me tell you what the word “one-shot” actually means and why you’re an asshole if you fight about it.

Much as I really want to move on from the End the Goblins scenario design example, people keep asking really important questions that deserve good answers. So today’s lesson is how the final design of End the Goblins might provide the players with the information they need to win it.. And how little information that actually is.

It’s exactly what it says on the tin.

Here’s a little Christmas rant for Mendel and all of the rest of my fans who want to know how you can deconstruct and subvert like the true master of fantasy literature, George R.R. Martin, the greatest fantasy author of all time who is better than Tolkien in every way. Merry Christmas, losers.

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.