Category Archives: GMing

D&D 5e’s alignment trap

Posted on by Henry

The 5e alignment system is a useful shorthand and a misleading trap. The Outer Planes as presented in the 2014 Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide only make the alignment system’s problems worse. The perfect overlap between alignments and planes—and the total lack of alternative Outer Planes—reinforces the alignment system’s worst inclinations: easy stereotyping, reductionist thinking, and a restriction of creative possibilities.

So what the heck are you supposed to do?

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No more bland-aids: make your Clerics interesting

Posted on by Henry

Hot take: clerics in D&D 5e feel like the blandest superheroes. Without a clear relationship with a greater power or a faith, it’s easy for them to float in the narrative void like a cornucopia of bandaids. The solution lies in placing more expectations on them, constraining them, and giving them a deeper connection with the story’s world and whatever they serve.

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Game system flavor & optional rules

Posted on by Henry

This is pulled from a conversation I had recently about optional rules.

Rules combine to make systems, and systems create flavor by shaping the permissible and supported space of a game. Any skillful or willful group of players (the storyteller is a player too) can play outside the rules of the game system they’re using—that’s normal!—but that play isn’t supported by the system, and it isn’t part of the flavor the system creates.

Optional rules are opportunities…

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Worldbuilding: a swashbuckling campaign

Posted on by Henry

I reviewed The Three Musketeers: D’artagnan recently, but I only realized I hadn’t yet reviewed it because I was deep in the process of creating a T3M inspired setting for an RPG. I knew I wanted the intrigue, the swordplay, the ambition, and the thrill of being small players discovering a much larger political game. So I hunted for and pulled out the themes that felt crucial to T3M’s fun, trying to find ways to create a setting that would evoke those while also incorporating the elements my players contributed.

I’ll lay some of it out for you.

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Make Games Your Own

Posted on by Henry

Always make your games your own.

I was trying to convince my sibling to play Blades in the Dark with me, and kept running into a wall. They just didn’t want to—more than that, they said it felt icky. I, like a good little sibling, kept poking at them until truth poured out.

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Banality and slow-burn horror

Posted on by Henry

What if horror games are actually driven by banality? Is Call of Cthulhu best when it’s mostly full of the everyday?

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Worldbuilding: leave room for later

Posted on by Henry

Leave yourself room for later. If there’s anything I’ve learned from doing lots of worldbuilding—for my own linear fiction and for the collaborative fiction of RPGs—it’s that trying to fill every last nook and cranny of a setting is a daunting task. And actually filling up everything is choking, stifling. Don’t fill up everything. It leaves no room for the future, and it leaves no room for anyone else.

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Dogs in the Vineyard, moral conundrums, quick thoughts

Posted on by Henry

Somehow, despite a decade of posts on this blog, I’ve never gone in-depth into Dogs in the Vineyard or what I love so much about it. There’s more to Dogs than I could easily cover in a single post: cooperative story-telling and turn-taking, cinematic descriptive and narrative tools, a conflict mechanic that encourages brinksmanship and escalation, a well-articulated method for understanding what’s at stake… all those elements are a delight.

But there’s another piece that Dogs explicitly encourages groups to home in on. That’s the experience of wrestling with moral conundrums, something many modern CRPGs both want—and struggle—to deliver. That’s what I’m focused on today.

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Majora’s Mask, Time, & Consequences, quick thoughts

Posted on by Henry

I’m thinking about Majora’s Mask again.

One of my RPG groups is currently struggling to solve several time loops and their various disasters. I love time loops (see my thoughts on Palm Springs). But at the end of our last run some of my players asked: “Are we actually getting anywhere? Because I don’t want to keep doing this if we’re not making any progress.” And that showed me that I needed to open up a little more, because, well…

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5e is wrong about Charisma

Posted on by Henry

Hot take: D&D 5e gets Charisma dead wrong. 5e only acknowledges a tiny slice of the greater whole: Charisma isn’t about being likable, it’s about being compelling. It’s about being a metaphysical Mack truck on a highway full of smart cars.

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