Roll Some Dice

  "We've had one wind, yes. What about second wind?" I am, admittedly, a rules-as-written kinda guy when it comes to 5E. I don't typically use houserules -- due in no small part to playing and running so many Adventurers League games -- but there's one pretty common houserule that's always bugged me. I've never really thought about why it bugged me so much, but I figured it out, and the answer involves something I don't think I've really seen anyone talk about online. The houserule in question: allowing a PC to drink a potion as a bonus action. And the reason it bugs me is that that's not what bonus actions are for. I think there's a lot of unspoken confusion about that, what the bonus action represents in the narrative, and consequently it seems like there's also a lot of people who've silently agreed on what that is . The question "Can I do that as a bonus action?" with regards to opening a door or drinking a potion imp...

From left to right: Rules Cyclopedia, One D&D Playtest Packet 5 I'm a big fan of the D&D Rules Cyclopedia .  Published in 1991, it compiles the Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, and Immortal boxed sets (aka BECMI) into a single chunky book, complete with Darlene-style hex maps of the "Known World" of Mystara in the back. It may be the best single-book edition of D&D . It may also be the only single-book edition of D&D , but that's neither here nor there. The RC has a lot going for it besides the form factor, like non-weapon proficiencies, something like prestige classes or subclasses, and... weapon mastery. Yes, weapon mastery, the cool new thing in the most-recent One D&D playtest packet that has everyone abuzz! And for good reason; it's a little something extra for the martial classes that doesn't come close to addressing the power discrepancy between casters and non-casters, especially at high levels, but still. (In addition to being...

SPOILER ALERT This post is about an inconsistency in one of the maps in Skullkickers: Caster Bastards and the Great Grotesque . If you're a player in a group that's currently going through this adventure, for your own sake you should stop reading now. DMs only from here on out. Thanks! An eagle-eyed reader sent us the following: On level 3 of the dungeon, the rotating room in D50 is controlled by the wheel in room D51... but the only way to get into room D51 is to enter through the rotating room in D50. Is there supposed to be another entrance to D51? Is there supposed to be another way to rotate D50? Maybe I'm misreading it, but I can't figure it out.  First of all, thank you for your feedback, kind Kickstarter backer (I assume). It's a good question. And you know what? They're not wrong! But let me give you some reasons why it's probably okay. The areas beyond D50 can still be accessed without messing with it or D51 at all. It's a more circuitous route...

  Well, it wouldn't be a real RPG book if it didn't have errata, right? It seems that in Skullkickers: Caster Bastards and the Great Grotesque (now available on a website near you ), a couple artifacts from the previous relationships subsystem sneaked through into the final product. Fortunately, it's only embarrassing, as opposed to something that causes an actual problem. The passages in question are on pages 45 and 47, but deleting the offending sentences is enough to fix it. Here's the one on page 45, down in the last paragraph on the page. If you can't see that, the two sentences to cut are these: If a character has an NPC roommate, that NPC immediately becomes an Acquaintance, assuming the character spends a little time getting acquainted with them. See Social Studies (page 10) for what that means for the character.  The two on page 47 are more of the same. Again, the sentences to cut are these: Any character who spends a good portion of the evening with an NP...

  BUY SKULLKICKERS: CASTER BASTARDS AND THE GREAT GROTESQUE NOW! These Strixhaven students would appear to be on some sort of adventure. Whoa, this got away from me, huh? First it was the holidays and then our 3rd grader went back to school in person after a long, long period of online learning, which you'd think would mean I'd have all kinds of time to be productive, when in reality my "one week to decompress" turned into, like, almost two months. But this Skullkickers-meets-Strixhaven series of posts has been on my mind the whole time, so let's get to it! So in this post, I'm going to look at the core of each of these two books, the adventures themselves. When the PCs aren't doing school stuff as students, or dealing with their relationships, or any of that, what's putting their lives in peril? What feats of heroism are they called upon to perform? Like that. I want to note right off the bat that there's a significant structural dichotomy betwe...

  Hey, but what about all the other stuff you do at school as a student that doesn't involve relationship drama or actually getting an education? I'm talking about the stuff a college puts in its recruiting brochure to convince graduating high-schoolers that it's a "cool place to be!" -- that hazy melange of social activities that adults think of when they look back on their college years. I think the difference in tone between Strixhaven:ACoC and Skullkickers:CBatGG is worth repeating here, because it has a huge effect on the limits of "student life" at each of these institutes of higher learning. One of the first things Strixhaven tells you about the place is that "It's Cosmopolitan." It attracts students and faculty from across the M:TG multiverse, all of them "united by a desire to learn." Pretty classy! In contrast, while the Academy is a highly esteemed school to the wealthy families that send their progeny there to incre...

  Rolf being "charming." One of the big things I knew we had to figure out for an adventure set in a school was the social stuff. And There are the dramatic relationships that punctuate a student's life in college or high school, yes, but also the kind social soup that a student ends up in that consists of acquaintances, members of clubs or organizations they belong to, dorm-mates, and so on. If a big chunk of the adventure was going to involve day-to-day student life, then those relationships needed to be engaging. It couldn't be just rolling Persuasion and Insight over and over, and I wanted the DM to have something to fall back on, just in case. I come from indie-ish games, sorta, where social interactions are often mechanized. For example, in Fate you can threaten someone with Provoke and deal mental stress to them, and that could take a character out of the scene as easily as a sword could. But D&D is a different beast, and usually relegates social interactio...

  In wizard school, books hit you. One of the big challenges with an RPG setting that revolves around school is figuring out how to make that part interesting. Yeah, there'll be adventures when Something Goes Wrong that more closely resemble mainline D&D, but just glossing over the school-stuff will rob the setting of the intended atmosphere. At the same time, going day-to-day with the school-stuff is obviously not an option. The tricky balance between those two poles will be our first point of comparison between Strixhaven and Skullkickers . Let me reiterate right off the bat that the tones of these two schools are drastically different. Strixhaven is a storied, respected, and successful institute of learning, magical and otherwise, attended by beings from across the multiverse. After all, as per the back-cover blurb: "The greatest minds in the multiverse meet at Strixhaven University." The Academy of Serious Sorcery and Holistic Occult Learning, on the other hand, ...

  In July 2020, I was lucky enough to be hired as the lead writer for a D&D supplement in which the player characters would be students at a wizard academy. Because a lot of it didn't involve traditional D&D monster-slaying and world-saving, the social game was a big focus. There were also new downtime activities to abstractly handle the actual business of going to school, and each term inevitably involved something going wrong at academy for the PCs to set right. The school had five organizations to which the PCs could belong, each of which came with distinct benefits. Throw in some new spells and magic items, along with an extensive adventure, and buddy, you got yourself a book! That book was not the recently released  Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos . It was, rather, Skullkickers: Caster Bastards and the Great Grotesque , a setting/adventure based on the Skullkickers comic series written by Jim Zub to celebrate its 10th anniversary. But the parallels are notable...

Our hero. Hey, so Gateway is this weekend and I never even did a proper recap of Gamex . What can I say? I've been busy. In lieu of recapping -- and also because I'd like to recap GenCon sometime before November -- I'm just going to post some pictures of the Big Board and some props. A brief recap of the storyline, though: The Modron Hierarchy has decided that the Prime Material Plane, and specifically the plane-hopping adventurers therefrom, is a serious threat to Mechanus and the Hierarchy. They believe there's a correlation between extra-planar incursions from the Prime Material and the rising numbers of rogue modrons over the millennia. The obvious solution is to destroy the Prime Material, and thus preserve Order. But you can't just destroy a plane of existence like that, not if you're a modron. There are procedures and protocols to follow. Forms to fill out, presumably. The wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly. Plus, you have to be sure about t...