Category: General

During the pandemic and the stressful events of 2020/2021 version 1.6, video games and tabletop gaming have become two of my biggest salvations. When I get done with my work day and move from my basement home office to the couch upstairs, I usually pull up whatever old JRPG or game I have unplayed...

Random encounter lists have been around forever in a variety of games. Back in the earliest days of roleplaying, they were used to give different wilderness encounters as the party laboriously traveled over vast areas on foot. Encounter lists have refined and expanded as games have and are often...

So, the D&D Dungeon Master’s Screen Wilderness Kit ended up in my holiday stocking.  While I’m not a product reviewer — other gnomes are more talented and dedicated to such tasks — I thought I might share a few thoughts on it. As a DM tool, it does several things really well. I know this...

As I’ve begun to move back to D&D online games run through various VTTs, I’ve begun to refine some of my game mastering techniques to accommodate some of the new challenges. One of the techniques I’ve pulled out of my old, tattered, black and white mead notebook is the concept of a default...

Dungeon delvers often get bogged down because they try to hit every room or because smash-n-grab tactics rarely get them the most sought-after prizes. Delvers aren’t exterminators. They aren’t archaeologists. They aren’t maids. Make the delve move by not requiring the players to have their...

This is the third article in a series on Israeli RPG theory. The first article in the series was “Your character does not exist“, and the second was “Everyone is a GM”. One of our writers, Daniel Andrey Fidelman, summarized the classic article The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast in...

Keeping players engaged in a dungeon exploration can be difficult beyond its basic premise: they are knocking down a series of doors in an impossibly deep and large underground facility.  But that’s not the real reason why progress in such a dungeon seems to crawl. It’s that it is difficult to...