Making a Memorable NPC for Dungeons & Dragons
We’ve all watched Critical Role, it’s a great show. Matt Mercer does an exceptional job of creating memorable characters far too numerous to recount. I talked a bit in another article about how to place spells on an nonplayer chracter wizard depending on their roles but let’s talk about NPCs in general. NPCs are a staple of every roleplaying game. From Dungeons & Dragons to GURPS, to Star Wars. Not every NPC should be a boss. If you build every NPC as a boss, the players will try and kill it every time. There is the old D&D adage if you don’t stat it they can’t kill it. This is a true statement, but they’ll still try, then they just sulk building new characters. Personally, I prefer to stat out NPCs, so I can get a better idea of what they’re capable of. If you want to make a dwarven forge master, great. How did he learn his trade, where did he come from? Is he gifted? There are all kinds of things to consider. We’re going to look at some options today about how to make NPCs a little more memorable and how to fit them into you story.
Critical Successes and Critical Failures from 1 to 20 in D&D
The critical hit is a staple of fifth edition Dungeon & Dragons and is integrated into the game’s mechanics. Critical hits and critical misses have a long history in D&D, and in roleplaying games in general. Many games have had critical miss or critical failure mechanics baked into the rules, but 5E D&D does not. Nonetheless, many gamers who are used to the concept of critical failures like to insert this concept into the game. The results are mixed, and many considerations should be made by a group before making any decisions about tweaking these rules.
Villains: The Hierarchy of Heinousness
Salutations, nerds! I’ve been on a bad guy kick recently and because of that I want to talk about D&D villains and how to use them. This is going to be broad strokes — a top down look at how bad guys can interlock to make a Dungeons & Dragons campaign feel more connected. I’ll get back to this topic again soon and get into some more specifics.
Waterdeep: Dragon Heist Highlights the Serious Business of Adventure
The newest adventure for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons takes players to a familiar city for some, Waterdeep, and puts them at the center of a dramatic heist involving 500,000 gold pieces. Offering Nerditor Doug a break from running our home group, I offered to run this one as Dungeon Master and share my first impressions of the book. What follows are my thoughts after my initial read through of the Waterdeep: Dragon Heist adventure as well as some ideas from my own game prep notes I’ll be using during our sessions.
D&D Dungeon Design: How big is too big?
It’s right in the name of the game Dungeons & Dragons. For decades we’ve all sat there with our graph paper or loose leaf and sketched out maps for terrifying dungeons. Some dungeons now even have a place in the game history like Tomb of Horrors. Over time dungeons have even evolved to a thing called the megadungeon, much like Rappan Athuk from Frog God Games or Undermountain as featured in the upcoming Dungeon of the Mad Mage. These super dungeons are huge and go on for days, with shortcuts through out just to get back to the surface occasionally. These aren’t designed for your typical “Go in, kill the goblins, loot and run out” adventures. The big question for dungeon design now is, how big is too big? You don’t want the party to say they’re done part way through, and you don’t want to be designing it and toss the map aside in exhaustion. Let’s look at some things that should help you mentally with dungeon design and how it relates to your story.
Cover-to-Cover Awesome Inside Creature Codex from Kobold Press
Kobold Press, you did it again. By now, backers for the Creature Codex have the publishers’ follow-up to the much-loved Tome of Beasts in their hands, and what a follow-up it is! Over 400 5E-compatible new monsters lurk within, ready to burst from the pages and inspire your own fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons adventures and campaigns. Designed by an impressive host of designers including Kobold-in-chief Wolfgang Baur along with personal favorite Dan Dillon joined by a warren of others — plus creatures commissioned by monster patrons — Creature Codex has a lot to love. And with art direction and design by KP mainstay Marc Radle guiding a team of incredible artists like frequent collaborators Bryan Syme and Marcel Mercado along with a whole bunch of others, discovering each page of this massive tome is a visual joy. So let’s get to it.
D&D Planar Adventures Are For Everyone — Start Your Planar Campaigns Today!
I love planar adventures in Dungeons & Dragons. And I’m not alone, based on the huge number of people out there with affection for the Planescape campaign setting first introduced in second edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Typically, travel and adventure in planes of existence beyond the prime material plane of D&D is the purview of higher-level adventurers. Getting to these planes is often a challenge by itself, and surviving the dangerous environments found there can be very difficult. The laws of physics and magic are often different, and simply being there at all can be a hazard to a character’s life. But you can forget all that, and take adventures across the multiverse of dimensions and create planar campaigns right from the get-go if you want.
Giving Players Chores at the Table to Keep D&D Running More Smoothly
Salutations, nerds! I want to talk about the division of labor at the table during a Dungeons & Dragons game! Now, I know you may be saying, “The Dungeon Master is doing most of the work, the players are just playing their characters, right?” But that’s not always the case. As the DM, giving players chores at the table is sometimes the prudent choice. A lot of the upkeep can be done by the players to keep the DM’s brain power free to keep the game rolling. So today I’m going to go down a list of chores you can give to your players to keep D&D running more smoothly.
Creating a D&D Menu Generator with New Chartopia Editor
Chartopia’s new editor has undergone a refresh and includes new features that make it even easier to create and modify your random tables. Auto-saving, multiple chart editing on the same page, and testing how the rolled result will look are now possible. The improved layout also helps you to focus on your charts without all the unnecessary clutter.
Let’s explore the new user interface by creating a medieval menu generator suitable for your Dungeons & Dragons campaign, because everyone loves food and medieval cuisine is somewhat similar to a fantasy food feast. After reading this tutorial, head over to Chartopia and create your own amazing menu generator of fantasy food.
The Dungeons and the Dragons of Dungeons & Dragons: Green Dragon Lairs
There are many concepts and values I find important to playing Dungeons & Dragons. This may shock you, but two things high on that list are dungeons and dragons. I like taking the dragons listed in the Monster Manual (and even beyond) and creating their D&D dragon lairs, sprawling dungeons with varying levels of complexity. This segment we’ll head back to the Monster Manual proper and take a look at the green dragon. What makes this dragon so unique and it’s lair deadly in it’s own right? Let’s explore introducing a dragon and green dragon lairs, together.
D&D Character Optimization Really Miscasts My Cantrips
Within the Dungeons & Dragons circles the conversation about optimizing, min-maxing, and power gaming is always in a perpetual spiral. I’m here to lay out the case that a focus on mechanical advantages does not benefit play or the party. A focus on D&D character optimization can reduce focus on an interesting character, most certainly leads to grabbing more than your fair share of spotlight, and piles work onto your Dungeon Master’s lap. This argument is not intended to stop you from playing your way. If this is fun for you, I’m not coming to your table and knocking your minis off the battlemat.
Running a D&D Game with a Go-To Adventure
As Dungeon Masters in any Dungeons & Dragons campaign it is our responsibility to guide the story and assist in the entertainment and fun of everyone at the table when running a D&D game. If you ask around, a lot of people say they are daunted by the amount of work that can go into being a DM or Game Master. And for some that may be true. Today I wanted to talk about having a go-to adventure that can twist and change with a few or more variables, which you can pull out of your pocket when you are unexpectedly called to run a game. It could be you are hanging out with friends on a non-RPG night or you might be at a convention hangout and you decide to get your game on.
When is D&D no longer Dungeons & Dragons?
I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons for some time now and until D&D 5E, the number of people playing has never been higher. The landscape of the community has also changed quite a bit. With live stream games and actual play series like Critical Role, and online play, the hobby is vastly altered. All these aspects make for a wider and better hobby. But it does bring up questions in my mind. I’m seeing more D&D playstyles than I ever have in the past and often the games I watch at other tables is much different than the game at my table. This leads to the question: when is D&D no longer Dungeons & Dragons?
Dungeons & Dragons Tavern Menus and Fantasy Culinary Culture
Salutations, nerds! Today I want to talk about Dungeons & Dragons taverns and things you can acquire in them. Specifically, let’s talk about the tavern menus. Are you the kind of Dungeon Master who likes to give your players a handout of a menu that’s prefabricated or do you prefer to make it up on the spot? Either way, there are useful things to consider when it comes to your taverns and the food that is available in them.
Quick and Easy D&D Adventures Redux
Hello! The following post originally appeared on my own site The Long Shot. At the time, I’d gotten back into tabletop gaming a few months earlier after a long time away, first through D&D Adventurers League when I lived in Austin, Texas. That’s when I first discovered Nerdarchy, which inspired me to start running fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons games when I got back home to Cleveland, Ohio. These days I’m all in here as nerditor-in-chief, but I got an alert that traffic was booming over on The Long Shot because of this post on creating quick and easy D&D adventures. I thought it would be fun to revisit the topic, with commentary on how my perspective might have changed on creating great adventures, and share it here with y’all. And there’s a TL;DR at the bottom to help make quick and easy D&D adventures even quicker and easier.
