Robot Viking

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.

If your gaming group is more interested in getting together once a week to drink beer and tell off-color jokes than going on deadly serious plane-altering missions, Critical!: Go Westerly just might be the perfect RPG for you. The GM is called the Bartender, and all characters have an AC score: Alcohol Content. Add a [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“You said this was a common room or something. Shouldn’t there be other stuff around? Like, what’s in the goblins’ pockets?”

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.

What kind of fiend is this launching itself out of the night sky to feast upon mortal blood? Duh. It’s a Fiend of the Shadows. She’ll make her appearance in the latest Magic expansion, Dark Ascension, continuing Innistrad’s tale of gothic horror in gruesome new directions.

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. [...]

Admit it, you’ve been waiting to see that headline for like five years now. The nerdy parts of the internet are burning down, of course.

What would an RPG character from a modern background look like in a traditional fantasy RPG campaign? Super Genius Games takes a stab at answering that question with the investigator class and three archetypes.

The art of Innistrad is among the best in Magic’s deep history of fantasy art, and it looks like Dark Ascension will carry that theme too. Have you ever seen a picture that perfectly defined “terror” as well as this one? (Well, maybe this one).