Tag Archives: 5e

5e is wrong about Charisma, part 2

Posted on by Henry

This post is (obviously) a follow-up to 5e is wrong about Charisma. If you haven’t read that post, this post is going to confuse you. If you aren’t familiar with Dungeons & Dragons, or what a roleplaying game is, or what saving throws are, this might be a bit of a stretch.

I haven’t dug deeper into the abilities of various monsters here. I have gone through every spell in the 2014 Player Handbook (PHB) which targets a mental saving throw. That means any spell that requires an Intelligence (INT), Wisdom (WIS), or Charisma (CHA) save. I’ve laid out a table with the spell names (sorted by level, alphabetized), what the original / current saving throw is, and what saving throw I suggest. Where further expansion on my thinking seems necessary, I’ve added notes below the table.

I’ve also laid out my thinking about what the mental attributes represent in their respective saving throws. Strangely the 2014 PHB doesn’t lay out much guidance on this front. The relevant pages are p179 and p205 PHB, and both entries are quite short. The pages preceding p179 are useful for descriptions of attributes, but they run afoul of my gripes aired in my previous post. The 2014 Dungeon Master Guide (DMG) has better guidance in a table on p238, but it seems clear (from comparing that table to the required saving throws of many 5e spells) that many of 5e’s spells from the 2014 PHB only loosely follow the guidance on that page.

So… what are the underlying principles that I’m trying to follow?

Continue reading →

Grumping about DungeonWorld, 9/17/26

Posted on by Henry

I have a problem. I grumble nearly every time I think about DungeonWorld. It’s gotten worse, and I’m at risk of full blown curmudgeon-itis.

I have to talk about D&D first. For better AND for worse, D&D remains most people’s touchstone for roleplaying games. DungeonWorld isn’t D&D, but obviously looks and sounds like it should be similar. Based on my recent conversations with newer explorers of the hobby, DungeonWorld is the not-D&D game that they are most likely to have tried. Those who aren’t exploring lots of different RPG systems will try out D&D, look at DungeonWorld… and then often go back to D&D. Whenever I hear that, I feel disappointed—not with them, but with how much better DW could have been.

Maybe my sample group is weird. That’s totally possible.

DungeonWorld (DW) is the Powered-by-the-Apocalypse (PbtA) game that I like the least. That has been true for a long while. This opinion pre-existed and is totally distinct from my thoughts about Adam Koebel (here’s some now-old news on that front). Maybe I’ll talk about that drama some other day, but probably not.

I’ve had fun playing DW. I’ve had fun running it. Heck, I ran it during its playtest and had a delight with my friends. Back then D&D’s 4th edition was still au courant, with its Daily, Encounter, and At-Will powers for every character class and its clearly MMO-inspired design. In retrospect I do like how D&D 4e worked as a tactical puzzle game, but DungeonWorld felt like a much-needed alternative. It was a game that felt D&D-ish and which didn’t assume everyone needed a tactical map to play their tabletop RPG.

I still really like the ways in which DungeonWorld encouraged the GM and players to all collaborate on the narrative and the setting. This wasn’t unique to DW: PbtA games regularly played around with more-collaborative systems. But DW had explicit mechanics by which players could contribute. That plus a great set of players led to The Underwatch, one of my favorite campaigns that I’ve run.

No, my problem with DungeonWorld is a personal gripe that I don’t expect others to share—and which I fervently want to convince you is correct:

Continue reading →

Teaching storytellers: recipes, ingredients, how to cook

Posted on by Henry

How do you go from “Running a game of D&D sounds fun” to “I have some idea of what to do”?

You could do what I did: play enough RPGs at an early enough age that you don’t remember  feeling daunted by or awkward about the transition from playing to running games. I figured running games was just what you were supposed to do. I paid attention to how my siblings ran games, and I tried to replicate that.

That obviously won’t work for most people. They could try the adult version, playing lots of games run by other people until they have some idea of what to do themselves, but what if they don’t have a good play group? What if they want more tools?

What other entry points can we (the RPG community) offer? What resources and pitfalls should we and new storytellers be aware of?

When I think about resources and pitfalls here, I think of ingredients and recipes. Roleplaying game materials are strong on ingredients; RPG books often include lots of “what” and “who” and even “where” to use in your stories. But these materials are often weak on recipes, and they certainly don’t teach you how to cook; they don’t offer much “why” or even “how”.

Without understanding the “why” and “how,” what is a would-be storyteller to do? How can we help new storytellers learn the why’s and how’s of the art of storytelling?

Continue reading →

Love/Hate: Priming your game with NPCs & Groups

Posted on by Henry

In our own world, there are people we love and people we hate. Our feelings about others might be distant or dispassionate, or they might be personal and urgent. Sharing a love for the people of a neighborhood, a country, a sports team, or a gang is a quick and easy way to bond with someone else—as is sharing a hatred.

As storytellers, we can use this.

Continue reading →

Building Consent (in RPGs)

Posted on by Henry

Consent is vitally important to RPGs (especially horror RPGs), yet is often taken for granted. Often, consent’s building blocks—trust, plus shared social expectations, desires, and goals—are only analyzed after something has gone wrong and the illusion of agreement is broken. I don’t think anyone needs to constantly check for consent at every new moment in their games, but you can save yourself some anguish if you establish those building blocks before playing.

Why do I think consent is so important in RPGs?

Continue reading →

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?

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

D&D & Disease (in 5e)

Posted on by Henry

There are a lot of topics that D&D isn’t ready-made to explore. As best as I can tell, disease (chronic or acute) is one of them.

This line of thought came up for me while talking with my sib about dangerous encounters in a weird fantasy / sci-fi / horror adventure campaign I’m running for some friends. It’s a roughly post-apocalyptic setting, based in The Hub, in which the apocalypse(s) in question took place a variable amount of time ago and in different fashions, depending on where the PCs explore. Some of the perils the PCs face include radiological disasters, and radioactive environments or threats.

My sib, naturally, asked what I’d done on the topic of cancer.

Continue reading →

Finding a way into D&D 5e

Posted on by Henry

My partner is curious about RPGs but didn’t reliably click with D&D when we played online over the first year of the pandemic. Some of this is no doubt an artifact of that group and its dynamics, and my partner only knowing one other player in that group. Some of it came from their struggles to find the sweet spot for playing their character and engaging with the story. We spoke about that a good deal.

But I think it was also due to D&D simply being… not simple. It’s not straightforward, or intuitive, or streamlined, or… any of that. My impression of 5e as an “easy” system is grounded in decades of playing RPGs, starting with 2nd ed. AD&D before I could reliably read or write. And while a different system wouldn’t have removed any of the hurdles posed by story, character, or group dynamics, I can’t help but wonder whether it would have made the other issues feel more approachable or less insurmountable.

There are plenty of other RPGs to play. The very narrative-focused systems which have grown from the indie RPG scene would offer games more focused on the character and story. Any number of Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) systems would have given my partner a more mechanically streamlined introduction to gaming. Hell, I love Monsterhearts and would happily play that all the time, and my partner enjoyed playing that for a little while too (though that group fell apart due to COVID).

We could have gone with Call of Cthulhu or Unknown Armies, for the straightforward percentile-rated skill-based gameplay with no (or very few) special abilities. I even could have used an extremely simplified GURPS—presumably with plenty of help during character creation, because that system feels like it’s intended to train future CPAs, and navigating all the possibilities of GURPS is a headache in its own right. What I’m trying to say is, I have a laundry list of RPGs that I’ve played and run before. At last count, most of a decade ago, I’d run more than a dozen systems and played close to thirty… and a lot of them were easier to engage with than D&D. That isn’t necessarily true for every step of playing them, but many have a lower mandatory cognitive load for “effective” play. Unlike with D&D, you don’t always have to keep track of an ever-growing collection of powers and abilities with hyper-specific uses.

But none of those other games are D&D. And that’s the problem. In so many other contexts, in pop culture, with other groups, or just playing with me and my sibs, my partner knows they’re going to run into D&D. And they’re abundantly aware that, for that to be accessible to them in the future, they need to pick up the basics at some point.

Which brings me back to the issue at hand. What other game might I run for them first, to give them a better feel for RPGs before they try D&D again? How might I run D&D differently to better engage them, and to help them feel their way into familiarity with the system?

I have some ideas.

We can talk through what genres my partner is excited to play, and choose a system with mechanics which fit. We can try some solo-play, to give my partner experience with a system without the distraction of larger group dynamics. And we can try a couple different one-shots or brief stories, to let us more-quickly sample the many different flavors available. Just jumping in and trying different systems and genres is probably our best bet.

D&D 5e doesn’t work equally well for everything, I’m very aware. But hopefully we can find ways to play that my partner enjoys, and give them the background to feel comfortable with D&D even if it’s not their game of choice. Wish us luck.