Author: Walt Ciechanowski

Random luck affects us all the time. Just last week, the sewer line backed up in my house. As it happened, a local plumbing company dropped off a coupon the next day, fixing our headache at a very reasonable cost. Conversely, several years ago, my brother called me to announce that my first niece was due to be born any minute. I ran out to my car – only to find one tire completely flattened. Neither of these situations had anything to do with my…

Back in the earliest incarnations of Dungeons & Dragons there was a player defined as the “Caller.” In addition to playing her own character, the Caller had the job of collecting all of the other players’ decisions in a round and communicating them to the GM. While this made sense in large games with 20+ players, it seems a little ridiculous when there’s only five people around the table. For my groups “Caller” was merely the D&D term for the party leader in-character. Still, I sometimes…

It’s funny how, as a roleplayer, it’s easy to become a creature of habit. If I rolled back time a decade, I’d find that I’m still following the same gaming schedule, I still have the same gamer friends and I buy my gaming stuff and reading material from the same FLGS. These things survived my growing family (in 2003, my wife and I were married a year; now we have 3 children), career changes, and new mailing addresses. If anything, my regular gaming habit actually…

Ever notice how, in RPGs that grant PCs advantages and disadvantages, PCs tend to use their advantages all the time while rarely being hindered by disadvantages? Most games I’ve run that use some version of disadvantages (or drawbacks, flaws, negative feats – you get the idea) implicitly give creative players ways to ignore them. Some players may select disadvantages that aren’t really disadvantages at all (e.g. the impulsive, overconfident bully) while others select disadvantages that rarely affect their characters (the one-eyed barbarian that has a…

Remember when all weapons did 1d6 damage? If you do, then you go back to the earliest editions of Dungeons & Dragons, where damage was exactly that. It didn’t matter whether you held a dagger or a two-handed sword; if you hit your opponent you did 1d6 damage. In the rules I cut my teeth on (Moldvay Basic), variable weapon damage was simply an option. Back then the variable damage rules made sense to me- of course a pole arm does more damage than a…

My last session was a perfect storm of “meh.” I decided to go with a last-minute adventure idea that wasn’t quite ready for prime time and I started the session with a splitting headache that had plagued me all day. On top of that, one of my regular players couldn’t make it and I introduced a guest player for the session. All of these factors ended up fostering a session that, while not terrible, really lacked the punch of my earlier adventures in this campaign.…

Do you allow players to keep secrets from each other? In my early days of gaming, it wasn’t uncommon for players to keep secrets from each other, usually to each others’ detriment. The party thief (that’s back when we called a thief a thief, you whippersnapper!) often wanted to pilfer some valuables from other PCs or undervalue the latest haul in the hopes of getting a better percentage. Occasionally a PC was an infiltrator, tasked with some secret mission by the GM that went against…