Posts Tagged "tao-of-dnd" from 2026

Agreed... as much as I'd like Buddhism to be a secret backdoor munchkin option for clerics via that reasoning :P

Gave my players more treasure than I normally would after a wight/skeleton fight yesterday and it felt good. But I couldn’t figure out whether your spreadsheet has an input for treasure type so I did the quantity ad hoc.

If Zoltan gets powerful enough to Plane Shift to Nirvana, or uncovers a different way there, and we all head on over, and discover it's full of blissfully working Alexises... well, you can't get mad if our characters sit down and roll characters. It's only fair.

Joking aside, I do like how you've poked logic holes in popular conceptions of heaven/perfection.

You've mentioned that one of the beautiful things about D&D is that unlike in real life, if players work hard towards something *and succeed*, the success will be meaningful and worthwhile. There will be a reward, or the DM isn't doing his job. That doesn't mean success itself is guaranteed, far from it. But succeeding at something does mean achieving a reward. Whereas in real life you can put in the effort and get somewhere, only to discover "somewhere" was never worthwhile to begin with.

Also, if there’s one thing I’ve learned as a DM from playing with you as, it’s that I need to give my party more combats and increase the size of treasure hauls. My current party has played ~45 sessions (!) and they’re all about 4th level. That’s ~3x slower advancement than in your game.

It was an excellent combat. We certainly *earned* that big treasure, it felt like, and earned it by the skin of our teeth. Pandred and I (Zoltan) were down to 1 or 2 HP each at one point. A couple different rolls could have totally changed things.

We're gonna destroy those trogs and get alllllllll the treasure from the shiny new Excel table. I can feel it.

I follow and appreciate the jewelry types and distribution. But I am wondering how you arrived at the ratios & calculations for the coins to be fit into the XP total.

I want to call “rebuilding the game as much as necessary” a good place to take them… for the few obsessives like us. :) But that’s just underscoring your point that the game as written, any edition, doesn’t work well out of the box. No argument there.

A DM has to be able to tap into two distinct ways of creating. During design (and play) the DM must be decisive and committed to what he has already made: "My rules for such-and-such work as follows"; "The game's design, its ethos, contains this, and does not contain that"; "Your character cannot do that because..."

But as you describe in this post, he must also continually reappraise his design and play techniques, and sweep them away if better ideas have come, without worrying about how long the previous techniques were in use.

If all you do is decide, but you can't reappraise, you won't be able to expand the game to offer more types of gameplay or more nuance for existing game elements. Your game will become repetitive.

It was a great session!

I'm sad I missed it! I'm ~900 shy of 4th level so yes, probably would have gone up. It's a-coming, though...

I can't believe the carrion crawler blew all eight attacks. The players must have been hooting something fierce. A lesser DM would have fudged and destroyed the sweetness of that moment entirely...

The hard part for me has always been to connect what I've read in fiction and history books with what's going on in the game, and pull out details that will make the environment believable, in real-time.

By "setting all avoidance aside" I only meant to imply that I couldn't care less that you ran away at first :) You killed the damn thing. Who cares what happened otherwise!

James, setting all avoidance aside, I want to thoroughly congratulate you on making the correct tactical decision with Melf's Arrow over, say, Magic Missile. Sure, the latter would have hit automatically, but it wasn't capable of doing enough damage to finish the fight. Though Arrow, with its roll to hit, can be seen as a higher-risk/higher-reward alternative to Missile, we were already in a dreadfully high-risk situation -- it was smart play to cast the spell that had a good chance of totally wiping out the dragon. (Especially since we knew 3 damage or more would stun!)

I've definitely noticed this characteristic of our fights in your game. This must be part of the reason the leveling up in your game is at least twice as fast as in my game. Under your *perfect* combat XP system, the larger the percent of full HP that a PC loses in a fight, the more XP he "extracts" from the fight. (Or in other terms, if sake of argument we say your fight-tuning skill exceeds mine such that PCs come 50% closer to death on average, then PCs in your game will gain 50% more XP for a given fight than if I'd run the same fight in my campaign.)

I read the title of your post and said "YES!" out loud.
I got to the all-important limitation of never repeating a wish and said "Oh, yeah!"
Fantastic stuff, Alexis! I think you've really done it with this one. Though I'll be sure to give you an actual play report if I ever have a PC get high enough to cast the spell :)

This fight was awesome and it was really down to the skin of our teeth! It felt SO tense. If Mikael hadn't made that 10% chance roll to stay conscious he would have been sprawled on the floor and probably much easier to hit; I bet an enemy would have finished him off. Even luckier was the caveweight missing by a single point when its minimum damage on a successful hit would have killed Mikael as well.

Thank you for writing this.

What makes it really impressive, Joey -- and must have made the moment tremendously satisfying for you -- is that you made that apothecary purchase ~5 real-world years ago!

"I'd say the party's engagement throughout was very strong. They were acting together, solving puzzles, standing up to me, acting perfectly like four gentlemen with plenty of experience in the game."

Thanks for the compliment :) I think we are gelling well as a party, and the game is a delight!

Oh jeez! I hope you and Tamara come out of all these health issues all right, and swiftly!

Fantastic! I am so looking forward to reading about the history of the halflings and the continuation of the spider-dungeon adventure.

I was sorely tempted to go the other route and turn the "self-righteous 17th-century Calvinist" dial as far as possible.

You say: "Personally, I'd prefer to be inside a strong, ordered structure that I can contribute to or feast from..."

This occurred to me as well. Believe me, I see the benefits of picking a popular local religion. I tried my best to weigh pros and cons, before the game and in the moment. I even considered, as a pro for Islam or various flavors of Christianity, that researching those religions would let me "double dip" to improve my own game world. I think maybe in the end my own familiarity with China won out...

Add my gratitude to the pile, Alexis, and bring on the kobolds!

seconded!

Echoing Sterling: I shared this post with my players. At yesterday night's game session, one of the druids showed up with pages of notes he took while reading this post, fitting together different elements of our campaign into the three game-metaphors that you used here. For instance, on his "Chess" response page, he wrote down every NPC or faction he could think of that they've encountered, and started thinking about how the party might be able to aid/oppose each one. Now he's transcribing them into a shared Google Doc, hoping the whole party will take it as a leaping-off point to do more planning in between sessions.

Thanks for your "Submarine" post the other day responding to my comment. I continue to enjoy Introducing Gameplay's triple whammy of (1) techniques from technical writing applied to clearly explaining what the game rules are (2) criticism interspersed throughout to show how, even though you're the guy explaining the game's "product specs," there are obvious flaws in the product (3) jumping off from that criticism to show places where a DM could or must expand on the written game rules if he is going to provide the players a good game. The second paragraph you quoted from the paladin section today is a perfect example of what makes this compelling reading.

I caught up on Introducing Gameplay itself as of a day or two ago, but haven't been able to read all of your new posts about this project yet. I've been wondering why you are devoting this project to explaining AD&D by the book, when you could be explaining your own game version instead. The approach would transfer over, no? You'd still be explaining what D&D is and how it works for a complete novice, without being beholden to some of the dumber stuff in strict AD&D.

Maybe 'cause AD&D, not being your creation, is an external yardstick against which you and others can measure your work?