Alignment has always been the sticky wicket of Dungeons & Dragons. It presents an objective set of labels to govern the inherently subjective nature of ethical and moral conduct. It’s adjudication – and even the value of its presence in the game – has long been debated, and will continue to be so long as it remains part of the game…
Playing at the World takes us on a fascinating journey to observe various factors that served to ultimately catalyze the creation of a new type of game with the creation of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974. This is the history of our hobby…
Tradition and innovation have always been natural opposites, as one seeks to maintain an existing set of practices while the other seeks to revise them, or even create new practices entirely. For Dungeons & Dragons, tradition had been a much stronger motivating force until the advent of Third Edition, when innovation was given a much greater role during its design.
The turn of the millennium had comparatively little impact on the world. The same could not be said for Dungeons & Dragons, however…
The evolution of D&D with regards to mandated end-points of character progression – and ways to bypass those end-points – was not a precise one…
Given that D&D Next is still a little ways off, and that its module regarding epic-level game-play is likely a bit further than that, it’s worthwhile to look back at the history of the game and seeing how each version of it dealt with the concept of going beyond the upper limits.
The issue of independent spell research is one of the stickier wickets of most D&D/Pathfinder games…
One of the major compromises that all role-playing games make is that at some point the rules will have to sacrifice some degree of specificity in favor of playability. No game, after all, can model reality down to the most minute detail…
It wasn’t too surprising that, by the time Third Edition D&D rolled around, morale had been left by the wayside. And that’s a shame…
One of the most omnipresent – and most dangerous – opponents your PCs can face isn’t found in any bestiary and is often overlooked by GMs: the environment.