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Dice aren’t really “good” or “bad.” Rather, they’re balanced or unbalanced. This means that they can have internal flaws that are messing you up. How can you tell?

A saltwater balancing test.

I have a confession: I always forget how conditions work when I’m running a game. There are fourteen conditions in 5th edition ; blinded, charmed, deafened, frightened, grappled, incapacitated, invisible, paralyzed, petrified, poisoned, prone, restrained, stunned, and unconscious. I lose game time looking up how restrained is different than grappled. Is it worse or basically the same? I never can remember. Recently I sat down and read through all the conditions in an effort to remember them, and I started to see a pattern. The reason I found them confusing was that many conditions where worded similarly with only small...

I come not to bury the Flumph, but to praise it. Last week on Instagram I ran March Madness brackets for D&D players called Monster Madness. Thousands of D&D fans voted for their favorites all week long. One winner I didn’t expect was the Flumph. Flumph lovers rose up to give it more individual votes than any monster up to that point in the competition, and it took out the Modron. Voters even started a hashtag for #teamflumph to rally around this strange, obscure creature. Unfortunately, its success was short-lived; the humble Flumph lost to the sinister Drow, and it’s fans changed the hashtag to #ripflumph. So,...

Dice. We all love them, we all need them, and we all have strong and sometimes irrational opinions about them. This week I put up a poll on my Instagram asking how a d4 should display its results. The debate was spirited. My poll brings up an interesting question and I wanted to answer it more thoroughly. A bunch of people wanted to know why there’s more than one way to show results on a four sided die. To answer that you have to go back to the original set of dicecreated for D&D in the early 70s. This is what...

Whats the Hardest Part of Being a DM?   Earlier this week, over on Instagram, I asked this question: What is the hardest part of being a DM? I got hundreds of responses and as I started to sift through and answer them, I realized something. I was seeing responses that could be basically organized into 5 broad categories.   Interpersonal Issues- things like out of character fights, people deliberately derailing the campaign or people acting like they are the central character. Preparation- not enough time and over thinking the prep. Scheduling- How do we all find the time to actually...