Descriptions Over Dice: Roleplay Character Actions Before You Roll Play
Hello! Nerditor Doug here to welcome guest posters from Dork Forge to the Nerdarchy family. Dork Forge are “a righteous, funny, and super humble group of fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons adventurers with killer memes.” The folks at Dork Forge stream games live on Mondays at 1:30 p.m. central on Twitch, with VOD on YouTube. They also have their own website with articles and video archives. This post comes to us from Dork Forge co-founder and Dungeon Master Tom Ball. Tom tackles a great topic that can trip up a lot of players from veterans to those new to the RPG hobby — how to roleplay character actions when the player themselves isn’t an expert. Using description in front of rolling those dice can enrich a character’s actions when it comes time to make that crucial check.
Delving into the West Marches RPG Campaign Style: Better, Faster, Stronger
We continue this archiving of my experience running a West Marches adventuring campaign style and if you haven’t read the first article and second article, you really should for context. My tabletop roleplaying game background is one that heavily focused on narrative and story. With that being said, this new RPG campaign style is a bit of a departure. This article will focus on the portions of the West Marches formula that I fell in love with, the major changes I made and the additions I constructed to bring the game closer to what I consider makes an enjoyable campaign style.
Beyond the Fantasy Setting: Converting for 5E D&D Steampunk
Cogs. Steam. Cogs and steam. Have the itch to get some steampunk in your fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons life? You’re not alone. Steampunk, and other niche genres derived from it, is a great addition to any fantasy setting. You can start your D&D steampunk experience by simply reskinning equipment and environments with all manner of odd baubles and whirring mechanisms or as deep as to tinker and toil brand new home brew to bring your steamy thoughts into life.
Only Human: Reskin D&D Playable Races for All Human Campaign
Many campaign settings strive for a more human-focused style but this often turns away many players as they see the lack of fantastic races as limiting character options. This is mechanically true if you get rid of all these races and do nothing to compensate for their absence. Often this is done through having cultural archetypes become replacements for distinct D&D playable races. Another way to accomplish this is to simply reskin character races as human cultures from your all human campaign setting. In this way, the standard assortment of D&D playable races are still available but appear and play like variations of humans.
Player Agency and Cooperative Stories Make a D&D Game Belong to Everyone
Its a very common phrase in the roleplaying circles that its “the Dungeon Master’s Game.” As with most aspects of this hobby, its not always so cut and dry. In your D&D game, you might find infusing some player agency through cooperative storytelling might get a you a new level of engagement from your players. This player agency can take many forms, to include working together with your players to collaboratively create the setting and world.
Win Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes for 5E D&D — First Look and Flipthrough
Friday, May 18, 2017 was the Wizards of the Coast release of Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes to specific FLGS and digitally through D&D Beyond. This is the newest D&D book from The Wizards of the Coast team. Wide release for this 5E D&D book will be on May 29.
The folks over at the PR company for the WOTC team, 360 Public Relations, is always good about getting us early copies so we can show them off to the fans. We always give them away. It’s still nice to get the free 5E D&D swag even if we don’t keep it most of the time. Speaking of which you can get in on a give-away running to May 31 for one of five copies of Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes.
D&D Etiquette from Metagame to Manners
We decided to do a video response to an article over on the Jimmi Waz Ere website. We copied the article below for convenience, as well as our thoughts on the 10 Things You Need to Respect About D&D Etiquette video. By all means if you like Jimmi’s article click the link below to take look at the articles he’s got on his site and show him some love by sharing and commenting on the original article.
Delving into the West Marches RPG Campaign Style: First Adventuring Sessions
We continue this archiving of my experience running a West Marches style adventuring campaign and if you haven’t read the first article, you really should for context. In an effort to not only gather my thoughts, but help you decide if this is an RPG campaign style you want to toy with, we are going to dive deeper into this experiment. That’s really what the whole thing has been and what I’ve stressed to my players: this is an experiment. I started running this with strict adherence to what I saw as the core tenets of the RPG campaign style. That’s what we’ll be covering here, my and my players’ reactions to what I saw as core of the prescribed West Marches adventuring philosophy and the beginnings of us altering that vision to our needs.
Kobold Press Adventure Module The Tomb of Mercy has Perfect Timing
Thanks to Kickstarter and late-night impulse shopping online, getting the mail is much more exciting than a trip from the mailbox to the recycling bin. But it was extra nice a few weeks ago to find an unexpected package. Even moreso one from Kobold Press! An unabashed Kobold Press fan, I tore open the envelope to discover an adventure module. The Tomb of Mercy, a very slick booklet on several levels, is a 5th Edition adventure for five 8th-level characters. There’s always a lot to like in a Kobold Press product, and The Tomb of Mercy, designed by Sersa Victory, is no exception. Soup to nuts, I’m digging it.
Is There a Best Way to Build a D&D Party?
We had recently did a series on Playing D&D without Filling Party Roles. We did a video for each party role and how play without them both as the Dungeons Master and a player. As a follow up we thought we’d combine some of the lessons we took away from that series as well as go into the opposite direction.
The Name Game Part IV: Game Titles (And Why Your Campaign Should Have One)
Salutations, nerds! Today I want to take a moment to talk about game titles. A lot of home groups don’t have them, but plenty of character sheets (looking at you World of Darkness) have slots for ‘campaign name’ on the page and promote doing so. So, allow me to put on my saleslady hat and try to convince you this is a good idea.
D&D Character Builds Gets Creepy with the Lizard Wizard
We do several different types of D&D character builds here at Nerdarchy. There is a series we call D&Dize. In those videos we take fictional characters from movies, TV shows, novels, video games, and comic books and stat them up using fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. Then there is just our normal or regular D&D Character Builds. These builds are based off of standard tropes in D&D. Each of these 5E D&D character builds are optimized to really good at a specific part of the game and fit into typical D&D tropes.
Tilting on the Axis of Alignment in D&D 5E
Some would argue alignment no longer has a place in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. No matter where you lie on alignment it has been and will be, for the foreseeable future, a part of D&D. We had better get used to it because it’s here to stay. Alignment is a moral reference point we as players use to guide our actions and make sure we are sticking to the concept we have laid out. As important as the Traits, Ideals, Bonds and Flaws are, the core concepts of law vs. chaos, good vs. evil and all of the gray area leaves room to play there within.
5 Magical D&D Weather Phenomena
Salutations, nerds! We play fifth edition Dungeon & Dragons, and a lot of the settings we spend our time in come equipped with intense magical nonsense that permeates almost everything from wizards to weapons to other odds and ends. Depending on the kind of campaign you’re playing, the weather can sometimes be overlooked unless the Dungeon Master is specifically trying to drive characters someplace to take shelter, and honestly that’s okay. We drop details to enhance play, not to get in the way of it.
Starcalled Studios Creatures of Vathis: Volume One Kickstarter is a Beast(iary)!
The team of Starcalled Studios is a group of long-time gamers dedicated to bringing you tabletop content. In addition to streaming fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, RPG video games and board games on their Twitch channel, they also created several books for their Zodiac Empires setting including a full-color, illustrated campaign setting guide and player’s guide, and an adventure, all compatible with both 5E and Pathfinder. Their latest project, Creatures of Vathis: Volume One, successfully funded in 24 hours on Kickstarter with several weeks left to go on the campaign.
