Passive Stealth and Other D&D skills – Making A Case
Not that long ago I moved back home to Salem (Oregon, not Massachusetts) from San Antonio (also not in Massachusetts). The other day I went to Dairy Queen, which I’ve been going to frequently, because for whatever reason Texans hate cherries, and I’m kinda making up for 15 years of not having my favorite treat, their cherry dip cone. After I approached the counter, I patiently waited for a cashier to notice me. Eventually one of them turned around, slightly startled at just seeing me there, without noticing me at all. The funny thing about that is, as I’ve become accustomed to, and what feels like a San Antonio tradition, I was wearing flip-flops. By all measures I shouldn’t be sneaking up on anyone, but apparently I have just a soft enough step and an unassuming presence that I can shift about unnoticed.
Diversity in Dungeons & Dragons
Behind the scenes in the Nerdarchy writers’ chat group, there’s been some discussion about creating a repository of pre-generated character builds for our readers, new players, or maybe even for Dungeon Masters to have on hand to pass out for their games. One of the chief requirements we decided on (if we end up doing it) is to make sure that we’re “woke” about character options. While I’m not a fan of the actual term, I fully agree with the sentiment. I’m a strong proponent of diversity. People can easily turn their backs on something because they don’t feel they can identify with anything in it. Not having something they can connect to is very isolating. This is more than understandable. It’s very human for us to want to feel like what we do is reflective of who we are. As a society, I believe we don’t do as good of a job as we can to be inclusive, but I can’t control society. What we can do is to be more inclusive in our everyday lives, and including as much diversity as we can in Tabletop RPGs is one way we can do it.
Using Tabletop RPGs for Social Empathy
I’m not really going to go about proving that science fiction sometimes gets used as a tool to pursue social issues. It’s well documented, and I don’t feel like I need to prove it. Star Trek is practically built on it. Fantasy novels aren’t immune from it, either. Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series bleeds social issues, perhaps even to its own detriment.
Tabletop RPGs aren’t exclusively fantasy and science fiction, but it’s hard to avoid their significant presence in the hobby. After all, we already live in a world of Houses & Humans.
Why would we want to spend four hours a week (way more than that for GMs) steeped in daily chores and making sure you include the TPS report cover sheet? It’s far more fun to enjoy something far outside of ourselves, usually with at least some fantasy elements, be it a western, superhero, or a horror game.
There’s actually another reason for that. As children, steeping ourselves in extraordinary worlds helps us learn about the real world around us. We’re able to experiment in a safe environment. As adults, that still holds true. In fact, I would argue that it’s more important for adults.
Jon Heder’s lesson in design elements for role play
Barbarian duck. Art by Stephen Prescott (deviantart user stephenartist)
Episode 99 of Critical Role may have irrecoverably changed my perspective of role playing games forever. Well, that’s not 100 percent sure. Jon Heder, who is coincidentally from my home town, made my favorite D&D move I’ve ever seen. He took Path of the Duck Totem Warrior. That’s right, instead of Bear, Wolf, or any other standard Totem, he went with Duck, which I assume he worked with Matt Mercer to custom make. My mom and I talked about it, and we kinda figured that being from Oregon played a role in him wanting to be a Duck, because there are tons of other ridiculous animals that he could’ve gone with. But the point is that he chose to do something ridiculous, and ridiculous it was. Not only was it ridiculous, but he used the opportunities to largely squander them. One of his skills was Commune with Ducks, which he used to get completely useless information.
Designing Dungeons & Dragons Races: Aatier
Very recently, in the wake of writing articles about modern firearms, I wrote a couple of articles about the ways we should think about designing and implementing various types of mechanics. Similar to the way that I shared my thoughts on modern firearms, I wanted to go over my thoughts on designing races, and the whys, whens, and wheres of doing it.
Postmodernism in Dungeons & Dragons
Recently, Megan posted an article about how to reconsider evil characters the same day a video with Nate, Scott, and Kyle talking about whether the alignment system was still viable was uploaded. Along with a conversation I had with the Nerdarchy staff writers about postmodernism, I was inspired to write an article about applying postmodern principles into Dungeons & Dragons.
RPG Designing with Purpose
Star-Lord (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In my previous article, I talked about the pitfalls we fall into when creating character concepts, or more specifically how we overcomplicate the process. That got me to thinking about another side of it. Why are we adding to the game? What’s our endgame? Are we adding to the story, or introducing a mechanic? Or, are we just tacking something on?
D&D: Uncomplicating Character Concepts
Recently, I was watching Satine Phoenix's GM Tips on Alpha about playing with kids at the table. It's a really useful video, and it made me consider a lot of things I never would've otherwise. Most importantly is how to adopt any given tabletop roleplaying...
New DM Handbook: Implementing Firearms
Last week, I talked about how you can include firearms in your Dungeons & Dragons game. Truthfully, I don’t think I included everything, but I believe it was a good primer for how to think about including firearms into your game. Perhaps in the future I’ll compile a more detailed modern firearms ruleset, which would include a detailed look at what I talked about last week, what I’m going to talk about right now, and other elements I never addressed, but that is then and this is now.
My main focuses here is about class archetypes. While the Monk will require the Way of Gun Fu archetype in order to use modern firearms, the Barbarian, Fighter, Paladin, Ranger, and Rogue classes will be granted proficiency in the identified modern firearms by class.
New DM Handbook: Rethinking Firearms
No, this isn’t a conversation about gun control. This is about introducing and including modern firearms into your Dungeons & Dragons campaign from the Dungeon Master’s Guide (264). With some help from Ty Johnston, who graciously aided me in my implementation for this article with his thoughtful insights and suggestions, I have something I think can be integrated into any campaign that wouldn’t explicitly forbid it by the nature of the world. I’ll go into further detail later when I’m going to be talking about ammunition, but gunpowder doesn’t even need to be introduced into your world to make it work. Artificers could infuse a cantrip-level spell of thunderwave, which we’ll call thunderblast, that can be activated by a mechanic in the firearm itself, which would then propel the ammunition without the need of gunpowder.
New DM Handbook: In-Game Games
It’s been a long time since I’ve talked about fully theoretical implementations. There are some things that have been based on observations, general concepts, tropes, and other literary tools, but it’s been a long time since I’ve talked about something I’ve absolutely nothing to base my ideas on. That’s what I plan on doing. I’ve set up the groundwork for my players for the future, but I haven’t had a chance to implement it.
Today, I’m going to be talking about in-game games. I can’t be sure how often they get used in most campaigns, but being that the way the game’s solution for contests is to roll ability checks against each other (PHB 174), I can’t imagine that it happens all that much. The biggest problem with this, of course, is that players that have some form of gaming set as a tool proficiency are now being penalized against the other more useful ones, which is where my solution comes in.
New DM Handbook: My Bag of Holding
D&D Beyond has been on my mind as much as I can afford, as any English major in his senior year can. I recently had a conversation with Scott Garibay about it, too. I can’t afford to do a lot, because I have so much on my plate right now, but I’m really excited by what it’s going to mean. Don’t get me wrong, I think what they’re doing already is good. It’s a useful tool that’s a very efficient version of a lot of things already out there. I know we’re only at the first stage of the beta, and there’s a lot more to come, but that’s the part I’m looking forward to. As it stands, there aren’t really any solutions out there that I like.
Dungeons & Discourse: Digital Media
As Nerdarchist Dave has mentioned in the past, the staff writers here at Nerdarchy.com have really started to gel. We’re putting together a module for Geek & Sundry’s International Tabletop Day that I think is fantastic, and we have a lot of great discourse, a majority of which is just for us. We share our perspectives with each other, elicit help, or provide suggestions. Sometimes we just talk about whatever. I think what makes it the best is that, even if we vehemently disagree with each other, or it’s a couple of us railing against the world, there is a genuine respect that allows us to know everyone is actually trying to listen to and understand each other, even if all we did was take a merry-go-round.
New DM Handbook: A Fistful of Rules
There have been a number of little topics that I’ve been meaning to talk about, but none of them are big enough to warrant their own article, so I’ve decided to compile them here.
New DM Handbook: Pirate’s Cove (My Tutorial Quest)
A couple of months ago, I laid out an article about the usefulness of a tutorial quest for new players. I’ve since referenced it a number of times in other articles, but I haven’t talked about the results, which I promised to do after finishing the quest with my party. A promise that I haven’t yet kept until now, mostly because there have been other articles that were more pressing or more relevant, for the moment. Especially in the light of my article last week about starting your adventure, which included the mistakes I made, now is the perfect time to share the tutorial quest I made, how things went, what I would do differently, and the overall lessons I learned.
