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 readingTag Archives: DnD
D&D & Disease (in 5e)
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 readingWorld Building: Making The Outer Planes Better
Once again, I find myself investigating the cosmological background of the setting I’ve most recently created. I was reading through the Dungeon Master’s Guide again, reading the section on planes near the beginning, and I’m in that usual place: somewhere between excited and miffed. Fortunately, it’s easy enough to change the things that haven’t excited me.
I’m comfortable, for the most part, with the material the DMG offers on things like the Astral and Ethereal planes. I’m more okay with the DMG’s ideas for the Shadowfell, the Feywild, and the various elemental planes. I’m not very happy about their ideas for the Outer Planes. I have some rewriting to do; let me tell you why.
World Building: The Hells of Errant Souls
Hell, courtesy of Dante.
Last time I kept mentioning someone that I decided to call the Most Powerful Devil (MPD), without ever going any further into who or what that was. But I’ve come up with more background for them since then, and in so doing I’ve also come up with more details for the game-world as a whole.
So, today I have a stupidly simple calendar (though I haven’t yet bothered to give the months names), I have a better idea of what the afterlife looks like (I’ve totally tossed out the basic alignment-based fare in favor of something a bit more complex), and I have a name and backstory for the Most Powerful Devil. I think you’ll like this stuff. Continue reading
Fistful of Wits 