Every action deserves an equal and meaningful reaction. This is what makes our game worlds interesting to play within: we can change them, and we can gain a sense of mastery in knowing how to change the world. Except when the consequences arbitrarily change. We’ve all seen this in varying forms. From fudged die rolls…

Bleed is the transcendent experience of experiencing your character’s feelings. It is the goal state of successfully feeling like someone else, walking in their shoes, experiencing their life, if only for a moment of emotional climax. And it’s awesome. I genuinely play table-top games to feel that rush (though it’s not the only reason), and…

Backstories are world-building, and should meaningfully inform the story. In particular, they build the world around the character in question; ideally, that world should connect to the worlds of the other player characters and the campaign world itself. Backstories are a way of connecting values, choices, and temperament to something comprehendible. Done well, backstories use…

A question on a role-playing game forum asked, “How do I make a character different from myself? I feel like I keep bleeding into the characters I play.” Let’s be clear, any character you create and play must come from you. It follows, then, that if you want a character who contrasts from you significantly,…

Backstories are world-building for the campaign. Honestly, your prose isn’t going to come up. Hear me out. Your character backstory isn’t a book, or a novella, or even a short story. It’s a character backstory, a reference document for the ways in which your character has interacted with the world in the past. Once you…

I’ve seen a lot of people make a lot of characters, and nothing is quite as infuriating as the Backstory Book, inevitably created by someone who gets frustrated because their backstory isn’t being used. Let’s be clear: I’ve done this. Everyone has done this, at least a little. Assuming the goal is Collaborative Play, and…

Nothing is short-hand for emotional context quite like music. It’s storable, sharable, available, and designed to create an emotional and physical response by artists who largely specialise in just the wonder of music. While music is open to interpretation, many experiences are fairly universal. Let’s talk about the how and the function of using music…

Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition began a new golden age of D&D because of one, simple reason: approachability. Where previous editions involved adding together multiple modifiers (up to eighteen) and so many rulebooks the Session 0 often involved asking around how many books could be used, D&D 5th was… simple. Proficiency bonus plus attribute, maybe…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that you could write a better system than what’s in this ridiculous rule book. The point at which someone stops being a New GM is when they start trying to make their own rules system. Whether a hack of an existing system or making something completely new, crafting the…

Picture this. It’s college, the late naughts, and we’re playing Dungeons & Dragons in someone’s dorm room. Pencils, dice, and character sheets carefully balanced on the backs of well-loved 3.5 manuals and math textbooks. Mountain Dew and Cheetos abound. Except for our paladin, because he’s diabetic, so he’s drinking Fresca. I’m playing the party rogue,…