“Why” and How It Can Improve Your Game

Willful suspension of disbelief is a concept that comes up a lot when talking about fiction. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it’s the idea that you sometimes have to stop your mind from saying “That’s ridiculous”, “That could never happen”, or “That is totally not real” in order to enjoy something. It boils […]

D&D: It hurts so good

A couple weeks ago I wrote up a bit about how I was doing D&D wrong, but I didn’t feel like I was wrong to do it. Happily, that garnered quite a bit of discussion, more specifically on Twitter (where you can find me faffing about all day anyway) about what makes D&D “feel” wrong. […]

D&D Discussion: Are you doing it wrong?

I used to post these updates over on my own site (www.vanitygames.com), which started out as a totally D&D DM blog-centric site. I was attempting to support my spouse, who had some vague aspirations towards game design, so I got into D&D so my spouse’d have a cheerleader on the sidelines. Well, that totally fell […]

Kill the cleric!

Alternately titled: “Turning player loss into dramatic character death” but that sounds way less catchy. The setup: I have a player for whom we coined the term “D&Dmo.” When he was present at the table, and I mean present and not just sitting there, he was fantastic. Bright, beautiful, an engaging roleplayer, a great tactician, a […]