Xaositects

I started playing tabletop games with Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP), and then Rolemaster in times of yore. Both systems use d100 tables to describe the results of critical hits. When I picked back up the dungeon mastering mantle with D&D 5E, where damage is meted out in mere hit points, I cracked open that Rolemaster red box and pulled out the goods. Those crit tables are always on my mind when I run games. It's probably unhealthy. The tables are full of colorful, brutal, realistic, and hilarious descriptions of weapon attacks, divided up by damage type (in Arms Law). There are incredible descriptions of spell crits for various damage types (heat, electricity, cold) in Spell Law. Those are especially useful for when "Foe freezes solid and then shatters into thousands of pieces after falling down 20 feet behind impact point." As my players will attest, I try to describe the realistic impact of each weapon and spell attack. It helps to keep folks engaged (I

Using D&D 5E Downtime Rules to Add Verisimilitude

Art from Battle Chasers by Joe Madureira Tell me if this seems familiar. A party of low level adventures embark on an epic quest. They are young but plucky and decide to take on the world. Eventually, they become pinnacles of their respective classes, with the power to reshape the futures of kingdoms! But there is something odd about them. It has only been 3-4 years of “in-game” time and they have spent all of that time adventuring. Despite their vast power to affect the world they are not really tied to the world. They have no homes and no real goals in life other than seeing how much a random wizard in a bar is willing to offer them explore the next dungeon or slay the next dragon. This is because most D&D games move from adventure to adventure at a breakneck pace. In many ways this makes sense. After all, the adventure is the exciting part and the players have limited time. Nobody wants to spend a whole game session where fighter is running that bar he always

What could Columbo look like as a D&D character?

The relentless detective is one of the most common character types found in literature, movies, and television. There, of course, is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Lynda La Plante’s Jane Tennison, Agatha Christies’ Hercule Poirot, G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown, and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Porfiry Petrovich, just to name a few. All many of my favorites.

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