Robot Viking

You have to love it when two things you really enjoy mesh together perfectly. In this case, those two things are”D&D” and “getting stuff for free.”

What would the world be like if D&D was a metal band instead of a game?

Sometimes you want to do more than just stand around and let your armor take the hits in combat. Can the newest edition of D&D accommodate active defenses? 4E created an elegant mechanic that allowed active defenses to be used easily, and that’s something I don’t want to see lost.

D&D Experience, a D&D-centric game con held in Indiana, happened this past weekend. In a series of seminars, an assortment of Wizards of the Coast creative people illuminated the future of D&D for those of us who have been eagerly hanging on every word they’ve released about the secretive project. Here’s a brief analysis.

I decided to enter Paizo’s RPG Superstar for the first time this year, adapting an old artifact used in my 3.5 campaign into a wondrous item. It didn’t go all that well.

There’s a lot of back and forth on the question of damage resistance and the role of magic weapons in D&D. Many players are opposed to the antiquated +1 or better to hit mechanic. How can the damage rules provide an underlying mechanical skeleton that describes the physics of the game world without bogging the [...]

It’s been almost three years since Wizards of the Coast pulled all ebook versions of their RPG products from virtual shelves, and there’s no sign that they’re coming back. In the meantime, they’ve developed the Virtual Table, a way to play 4E D&D online. They’re heading in the wrong direction. Here’s why.

A limited print run of premium hardcover reprints of the 1st Edition D&D books will be published by Wizards of the Coast in April. Some portion of the profits will assist the fund to create a statue in honor of D&D co-creator Gary Gygax.

Dungeons & Dragons Online (DDO) has been free to play for more than two years now. Rather than a death knell, the end of monthly subscriber fees in 2009 turned out to be a brilliant decision that boosted the number of users and increased profits. How well are things going for DDO? They just announced [...]

Since the big announcement of 5E, or D&DNext, or whatever you prefer to call it, there hasn’t been much concrete info on what the new edition would be like. Mike Mearls revealed a few interesting morsels of data in an interview at Gameinformer. What exactly will it mean to “unify” players of previous editions?

Whether you’re playing in a forum or email campaign and want to track your Pathfinder character online, or just prefer a clear, easy to use character sheet to run on your laptop at the game table, DPS 2.0 will do the trick.

RPG Attack is a program that fills a very, very narrow niche — people who want to apply academic style statistical analysis to RPG combat. There probably aren’t very many people like that in the world. I still think it’s really cool.

Happy New Year everyone. Anything insteresting happen so far this year? Any big announcements?

Creating magic items can be complicated business. I’m not just talking about within the game world, where you have to research for 15 days, find a dragon spleen and a diamond worth at least 500,000 gp. For DMs, it can be a maze of DCs, creation costs, caster levels, item slots and other confusing details. [...]