You love to hear when people like your work, so I was thrilled to see my Dungeon Delver’s Guide on Polygon’s best-of-the-year list for TTRPG books. I’m particularly proud of DDG because it’s such a personal project: I pitched the idea, assembled the team, and did a heck of a lot of writing for it. In fact, I’ve been developing it and testing it – on this very blog, even – for years. While we’re talking DDG, let’s mention DDG’s contributors: Brandes Stoddard, Cassandra Macdonald, Mike Myler, Morrigan Robbins, Peter N Martin, Rory Madden, Sarah Madsen, William Fischer, Will Gawned, Anthony Pryor ..read more

Can ChatGPT generate D&D rules? As D&D freelancer, that question is top of mind these days. Not “can ChatGPT generate better rules than a good game designer?” I think the answer to that is quite obviously no. But “can ChatGPT generate content good enough that a publisher might think, hmm, paying 0/word is better than paying 5, 10, 15 cents per word?” Let’s see where we stand. I’ve just made a ChatGPT account and I’m going to give it a few prompts to see whether it’s good enough to take my job – or work for me, if I’m inclined to hire it! Fair warning, I’m rooting against ChatGPT, but I ..read more

Magic based on the four elements is fairly entrenched in D&D’s monster list and cosmology, in the form of elementals, genies, the planes of existence, and so on. I’ll be honest, though–I never thought it was actually that good a match for D&D. Elemental magic is fairly shopworn at this point, having appeared everywhere from Avatar: The Last Airbender to Frozen to Pixar’s upcoming Elemental. But based on its age, D&D gets a pass on that. The real problem with D&D’s take on elemental magic is, unlike in shows like Avatar, there is a major coolness disparity between the four eleme ..read more

It’s happening! Dungeon Delver’s Guide is now available to Kickstart! If you back it today, you’ll have the PDF in your hands in a month. I’ve been working and testing Dungeon Delver’s Guide for years and I think it advances the state of the art of D&D dungeons. It lets you prepare a dungeon fast, or even run it on the fly, and still have it feel like you worked on it all week. Plus it’s stuffed with DM/GM goodies like traps, magic items, and monsters, and player goodies like new equipment and stats to play as my beloved ratlings. Go forth and delve ..read more

One afternoon in 2003, as a gag, I made an intentionally bad Flash game, Quest for the Crown. It had an epic intro, long credits, and then hilariously (to me in 2003) short and easy gameplay. You just walked to the crown, which was visible on the opening screen, and picked it up. There was a problem: there was a bug in the code. When you chose to “play again”, you moved two squares each keypress. The third time you played, you moved three squares, and so on. Soon it became a challenge to get to the crown: you had to bounce off rocks all over the map in order to get to that damn crown. Complete ..read more

I wrote a new, non-OGL, 30ish page fantasy tabletop RPG: THE HACK It’s class-and-level-based roguelike dungeon crawler game, reasonably compatible with other leading brands – and designed to be expanded, extended, and made their own by anyone who wants a free (as in freedom and beer) RPG. The Hack is inspired by the 1989 open-source gameNethack, and to a lesser extent its predecessors Hack (1984) and Rogue (1980), and is released under CC BY-SA 4.0. It’s got a lot of Nethack DNA. Play as a wizard blowing up ghouls or a rogue backstabbing dragons; identify mysterious potions and learn spells fr ..read more

I’ve been talking a bit about my book Dungeon Delver’s Guide which is being published by EN Publishing. Well, it’s done and the kickstarter is launching later this month! Get notified on launch ..read more

WOTC offered a proposed draft of their Open Gaming License replacement. They’re supposedly listening to our feedback, so it’s worth talking about what still needs to be fixed to make it usable for third party partners. Read this post and then take the survey. Short version: a lot needs to be fixed. They offer basically two options: use a Creative Commons license of a limited set of game mechanics, or else OGL 1.2, which is less permissive and offers more stuff. Let’s examine both options and see if you can use them as a D&D third party creator. 1: The Creative Commons option. WOTC is propo ..read more

I am a D&D fan, as you have probably figured out, so I’m horrified to see WOTC fail so spectacularly in its stewardship of D&D. In 2000 and 2016, WOTC put out open versions of D&D rules under the Open Gaming license, meaning that there were free, good D&D rulesets available for publishers and players to use. This led to a golden age for D&D and RPGs, both financially and creatively, with WOTC raking in money while smaller creators got to share a kind of roleplaying commons. This year, it looks like WOTC is trying to use legally questionable rules-lawyer tricks to kill the O ..read more

5e D&D’s bounded accuracy is supposed to keep attack rolls, DCs, and other numbers in check, allowing monsters to stay relevant longer and decreasing the gap between proficient and non-proficient characters. In a 2012 blog post, WOTC’s Rodney Thompson said this: Nonspecialized characters can more easily participate in many scenes. While it’s true that increases in accuracy are real and tangible, it also means that characters can achieve a basic level of competence just through how players assign their ability bonuses. Although a character who gains a +6 bonus to checks made to hide might ..read more