Opportunity Actions: Races of Athas – Gnomes Revisited

Here I am, once again diving into a series. I want to go back to my Races of Athas series, and clean things up a bit. I’ve had some time to think about a few of these, and I think I can improve on what I’ve written. I hope you see these as improvements, too. […]

Speeding up D&D 4E

Much digital ink has been spilled on the topic of speeding up combat in Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. I think at this point we can all at least agree that combat can grow a bit sluggish at times. The interesting thing is, and it’s something that some people have touched upon at various points in the 4E lifecycle already, that there seems to be a paradigm shift away from the simple “4E is slow because of combat”, and I think that’s a very good thing.

The “new” (and it’s not new, just only discussed by a select few in the past) idea is that the problem lies more in adventure design than combat sluggishness. @glimmthegnome on Twitter planted the seed of this idea for me a couple of weeks ago, @gamefiend pushed it along, and @neogrognard put it into words in his Save My Game column on the Wizards website last week.

Lost Skills: Perform

I’m an old dog: it’s hard to teach me new tricks. For example, take a recent 4e character I made. Lute playing is a huge part of my character concept, and I instinctively wanted to quantify his lute-playing expertise as a stat. But it turns out there’s no spot on the character sheet for musical […]

Aspects of GMing: DFRPG vs D&D

As many of you know, I am a huge D&D fan. I have played for many years and I love the game. Since I recently started GMing a Dresden Files RPG game, I have been reflecting on the differences in running these two games. As such, I thought it may be appropriate to discuss some […]