Dungeons & Dragons

What makes a good Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition official release or 5e-Compatible supplement?

June 21, 2022 by krisis Leave a Comment

I thrill at checking out every new bit of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition material, whether that’s official releases, 3rd party D&D resources, or 5e-Compatible material. And, in 2022, there is a lot of 5e material!

Wizards of the Coast has been ramping up their official release schedule, it feels like there is an infinite selection on DMsGuild, plus massive new projects appear every week on Kickstarter. Given the pandemic-era surge in D&D’s popularity, plus its mainstreaming via Stranger Things and live play shows like Critical Role, I don’t think the tempo of releases will be letting up any time soon.

With so much 5e material to choose from… how exactly do you choose? Almost every player will start with either a Player’s Handbook or a Dungeon Master’s Guide, what should be your next purchase?

I think it’s important to understand what you’re looking for out of a supplement. Otherwise, it all looks equally attractive and you wind up buying more books than you could ever reasonably play through.

Even I, notable obsessive collector of stuff, know not to pick up certain materials with additions that will never make it to my virtual tabletop.

When it comes to choosing the right materials for you, I’d say that vast majority of official D&D, 3rd party D&D, and 5e-Compatible materials offer content that falls into one or more of nine possible categories. I’ve ordered them from the most-expansive to the most-granular, in terms of what they add to the game. =

Keep reading to understand what I mean by everything on the list! And, for each category, I cover the best official books and some of my favorite 3rd Party releases! [Read more…] about What makes a good Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition official release or 5e-Compatible supplement?

The Infinitely Expanding World of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition

June 14, 2022 by krisis Leave a Comment

The first email list I ever joined was about Dungeons & Dragons.

I’m always surprised when I remember this.

Image by ScalyDragon from Pixabay

I wasn’t all that into D&D as a newly-minted teenager. I had never even played it. To that point I only knew it by the lingering reputation of its satanic panic and because that one stereotypical metalhead in my 8th grade class played it.

Yet, I had recently made the connection that the finite worlds of video game RPGs like Final Fantasy could be emulated in Dungeons & Dragons.

Between obsessions with comic books and music, I begged for a set of the core trio of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books as a gift, and spent spare moments imagining the worlds that could be built with them while trying to understand exactly how ThAC0 worked.

Thus, early in my days on AOL, I joined a D&D email list.

I fucking tormented them with my terrible ideas. I wanted panthers with wings a a playable race because I had made them up in a fantasy story I was writing. I wanted every character from Final Fantasy 3(/VI) as a playable class because that was my doorway into D&D.

I’m not sure if I got kicked off or if I wandered away dejected when no one liked my ideas. I never did wind up playing much D&D.

If you were on that mailing list: I’m sorry. I now fully understand the pain of having to occupy the same internet as the entire world of overeager teenagers.

I’ve fallen back in love with Dungeons & Dragons again over 25 years later for some of the same reasons I was enamored with it in the first place: it’s a vast storytelling system that is infinitely extensible and invitingly hackable. Any character or creature or setting you can imagine is just a fistful of stats away from fully existing in your campaign world.

The toy of Mon*Star was the perfect scale to swat a G.I. Joe out of battle as if he was kicking a puppy.

I love that. I’ve always loved that! I was the kid who always wished all of his toys could be the same scale so they could inhabit the same worlds as each other. Even if they weren’t that wasn’t going to stop me from having my Super Friends Wonder Woman team up with my G.I. Joes to fight Mon*Star from Silverhawks.

That D&D mailing list was a small window into the world of extending and hacking D&D at the time. There were also 3rd party D&D products, although you’d be forgiven if you never got to them because there were so many official D&D materials to choose from it felt like you could never even see them all, let alone own them all.

(I’m sure someone on that listserv owned them all. They probably hated me.)

Over the years, Dungeons & Dragons has increasingly realized the sheer power of that infinite extensibility. In 2000, Wizards of the Coast released the 3rd Edition of D&D and, alongside it, the concept of the D20 System and the Open Gaming License (OGL).

Simply put, the D20 System meant you could expand on the established rules of D&D with your own products bearing the D&D logo, but you could not supplant the need for a core rulebook

The accompanying Open Gaming License meant you could use, change, or omit any of the rules and mechanics of D&D with the brand and lore filed off like a forgotten serial number.

This freed Wizards of the Coast from having to produce disposable, low-profit books of adventures to keep their players glued to their tables. Any company could produce a derivative work to offer to D&D players via the D20 system, which could be as minor as a few new monsters, or via the OGL, which could be an entire gaming world and system that just happened to use D&D mechanics. That means you could officially use D&D rules for a modern day setting, or a sci-fi story – not only at your home table, but in a published work.

Fast forward to the present day and the current 5th Edition of D&D – 5e, for short, which has been in play since 2014. [Read more…] about The Infinitely Expanding World of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition

My Dungeons and Dragons Lifeline

June 3, 2022 by krisis Leave a Comment

Gather round, folks, because I bring you a tale that begins on the very precipice of the pandemic, extends through a year of extreme burnout, and involves a fantastical land full of dragons, dungeons, and indecisive half-elves.

Picture it: February 2020, AKA the last normal month on Earth. We were all reading COVID-19 articles with a sense of bemusement that grew into dread as they crept from the international news section forward to the front page, but most of our lives hadn’t been changed by it at all.

Three big things happened in my life in February 2020. First, I started what seemed like it was my dream job (spoilers: it was not).

Second, I started playing D&D remotely with my college friends back on the East Coast.

And, third, we were almost deported!

Of these three events, it seemed like starting the D&D campaign with friends would prove to be the least significant. It was the 18th anniversary of when we assembled to play together in college. That campaign ran for just a few months, but it gained an appropriately mythical status in our collective hindsight. When our beloved friend Dante passed away in 2014 we reformed for a one-off night, but none of us ever expected to play together again – certainly not with me halfway around the world!

During a catch-up with Lindsay about my new gig, she mentioned that some of the old gang would be assembling physically for a new campaign. We joked about how funny it would be to have me projected on a screen playing remotely – imagine that! But, the more we joked about it, the more the idea took hold. After making arrangements with our longtime DM, I appeared in that first session live from New Zealand!

I cleared off a desk in our spare bedroom, still packed with boxes from our recent move, and pointed it out the window so I could enjoy the sunny day while I played with friends who were up past midnight back in the US. It was ridiculous fun. We had forgotten all the rules and were all playing newly-invented characters and classes we had never played before. I inadvertently vaporized an entire alleyway of assailants with my first Thunderwave. Even though the session was meant to be a one-off, we agreed to reconvene two weeks later.

Two days later, the New Zealand government informed us we were 40 days away from deportation.

(This is too big a story to explain in full here, but in short: The NZ government told us repeatedly in writing that we absolutely should not renew our visas while we waited on a decision on our residency application. When we (as a pair assiduous rule-followers) did not renew our visas while waiting on said decision, the Ministry promptly informed us that our visas had expired, we were in the country illegally, we had to quit our jobs, and we should make plans to depart immediately.)

The weeks that followed our deportation notice were one of the most stressful periods I’ve experienced in my entire life. We lived every day wondering if we should put our newly-moved-into household into storage and look for a place to stay back in the states even as a global pandemic began unfolding. It was one of the many times in our lives as recent immigrants when we realized how powerless we were and how arbitrary the rules of borders and residency are in every country around the world.

Truly, I don’t know if I would’ve had the emotional fortitude to survive our tense process of getting emergency visas without the fresh connection with my best friends from the states and the knowledge that I’d see them all again in two weeks. We played that second session with all of us remote from each other as the early days of the pandemic reached into all of our cities. I certainly had a thrilling story to share in our “what’s been going on with you in the past two weeks!”

Then, between our second and third session, New Zealand began its first two-month COVID lockdown. That meant no leaving the house, other than for groceries, gas, banking, medical care, or a short walk around the neighborhood.

Even if the states wasn’t in an official lockdown, all of my party members were similarly shut in their houses. It was the perfect opportunity for us to set a regular date to play – none of us were going anywhere! Each session before playing we would catch up, sharing our stories of hunting for scarce groceries or finding the perfect pattern for sewing masks.

As our initial campaign drew to a close, I asked if I could take a turn at being Dungeon Master for a session or two while our regular DM prepped his next adventure. I had always been fascinated by DM-ing as a mash-up of carefully planned math and improvisational storytelling, but I never had the guts to try to convince people to play with me as a first-time DM. [Read more…] about My Dungeons and Dragons Lifeline