In the first two posts of this series, I’ve discussed the history of the ranger class from OD&D to 2e, along with the peripheral additions that splatbooks added to it. Now that I have a little writing time again, I’m going to see if I can wrap up 3.x through […]
I’m working on a new subclass for rangers, focused on snares and cunning use of terrain. Working toward that end, I’ve created five new spells for rangers, and as the druid spell list is largely (though not strictly) a superset of the ranger spell list, I think these spells are appropriate […]
In my (now long-running) D&D Next/5e game, the players explored a dungeon called the Monastery of the Blessed Scroll (layout based on Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire). I run very few dungeons that take much more than 2-3 sessions at most to explore, so this post documents what I did, and […]
During the public playtest of D&D Next, I did some fiddling around with the sorcerer class to keep it current-ish with later packets, because several of my players were so intrigued by the original class concept. My efforts weren’t great, in part because they highlighted what was wrong in the […]
A few days ago, the G+ thread following +Rob Donoghue‘s post on Rangers and Rogues led to an idea that really grabbed me: the Mastermind Rogue. This is a Roguish Archetype that roughly parallels some of the functions of the Bard and the assisting functions of the Battle Master archetype. For […]
In my campaign, the Bounty Hunter background in the playtest documents was one of the more popular options. Since the setting runs more toward late-Renaissance and early-colonial rather than the core medieval setting of most campaigns, players used that background to cover slightly more modern law-enforcement concepts as well. The […]
Spells This breakdown of spells is lengthy enough that I’m going to boil down trends first, rather than making readers wade through a discussion of literally every spell in Basic to read a derived change log. You might say it’s a trifle dry. (This blog is justly accused of same; […]
When last we left our intrepid blogger, I discussed Combat and Conditions in D&D Basic, focusing particularly on how the rules had changed between the playtest packet and the final. This time, it’s Part Three, the Rules of Magic. In June of last year, I wrote about the spells of […]
This is my fourth post reviewing the D&D Basic rules, including comparison to the last playtest packet. Previous posts have covered races and classes; personality, backgrounds, and equipment; and general rules and adventuring. Judging by the title of the post, I’m probably writing about combat and conditions this time. Like […]
In this, my third post comparing D&D Basic to the last of the playtest packets, we get into the fundamental rules of D&D. In the Basic PDF, it’s Part Two: Playing the Game, but either part of that would make for a misleading post title, and what kind of barbarian […]
