Enthusiastic Amateur

Following on from Tuesday I will say that there’s one time in Dungeons & Dragons you should always include a trap; in an intro adventure. Intro adventures are cool beasts designed for new players to teach them the game mechanics, but also give them a feel for what the game is about. A good generic intro adventure will combine all the elements of Iconic Dungeons & Dragons; a meeting in a tavern, goblins, skeletons, an actual dungeon, at least one Rust Monster or Gelatinous Cube and, of course, a trap. Traps are, despite my distaste for them, a part of the fabric of D&D, and if you want to give your intro party a taster of the D&D the might recognise from TV then you better be prepared to throw one in there. So which one? On Tuesday I talked about traps having a negative impact on my own party’s play experience and the last thing you want to do is have someone’s first experience of D&D be them falling in a pit and struggling to get out. So, what trap...

[This post contains spoilers for Princes of the Apocalypse] A chubby hand formed into a fist, shaking, the knuckles swelling. Jolliver panted in the dark and cursed, spitting blood and phlegm. It wasn’t working any more. He had to be in control of it, it wasn’t in control of him. He flopped back on his bed, dropping the bottle to the floor where it failed to make the customary clatter. He frowned and sat. The bottle was on the floor, sat at an angle. The stone around it was warped, discoloured. He looked at the slab it sat on and saw the edge where it met the next disappear. His eyes were wide but it was already too late to scream. Our party are: David Maltman as Reed Tosscobble, Halfling Rogues Swashbuckler David Longbottom as Ulfang Strackhelm, Dwarf Cleric of Helm Amanda Hewitt as Eva Dawnfell, Human Monk Necromancer Amy Tan as Amber Frostbeard, Dwarf Fighter After the attack by the Water Cult the party moved camp and amongst a secluded copse of trees lai...

Over time I have become obsessed with loops, the cycles of gameplay that make up the whole, the patterns of input and the output stimulus that make up a games. They’re what grabs us initially and, when well designed, they are what keep us coming back, over and over. There are different kind of loops, smaller loops are moment to moment; the action of cover, shoot, reload, grenade, are all cycles of action to end result. The best are consist, with an obvious and direct correlation between the players skill and the output of success. These build into bigger and more abstract systems, loot and random reward loops. These are the systems that keep us playing. Smaller loops give us the reward of satisfaction, of seeing the end result of our actions and knowing that we made that kill, that we scored that critical, that we secured that point. A loot system galvanized this by turning time invested into repeating these loops into an irregular reward, a cherry on top of our own personal succ...