General Nerdness | Página 1 de 2

I have mixed feelings about Dungeons & Dragons, for years I didn’t liked it, then two years ago, almost to the day, I read 5e’s PHB and DMG and I… had opinions about it. I felt the game, as I had seen it played, was not actually a good representation of 5e, that nobody was actually reading the books. It was the start of the pandemic, and my partner, who is a fan, wanted to play D&D with her online friends, so I bit the bullet and I began running 5e. In June that campaign will be 24 months and going.

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A few weeks ago I woke up thinking about Matando Cabos, a very good comedy film, and I realized it’d be very fun to play something similar using Fiasco. So that very weekend I sat down and wrote a playset Fiasco Classic: Busca un Problema. A playset inspired by 2000s Mexican comedies, specially dark ones, like Matando Cabos, Nicotina and Rudo y Cursi.

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Dungeons! … can become a boring railroad, but they don’t have to. Personally whenever I think of dungeons I don’t actually think of TTRPGs, I think of The Legend of Zelda. Stone Tower, Water Temple, Fortress of Winds, Tower of the Gods… the list goes on. Is there a secret to a Zelda dungeon? Can we reverse engineer a Zelda style dungeon into our TTRPGs?

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Zelda Dungeons are the gold standard to me. In a previous post I showed you how to design a dungeon in the style of those games. Here’s some advice on how to run that dungeon!

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I’m running a Wildemount campaign and this is the encounter I ran in our last session. It was 100% improvised at the time, but I liked it and I decided to write it down as a proper encounter, so here it is! Normal[?] content will resume next time :3

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The Golden Rule of TTRPGs is a variation of: these rules are just recommendations you are the final arbiter of what your game actually needs and you should feel free to ignore or modify these rules as required. It is very good advice, so why do I have conflicting feelings towards it? Today I argue with myself and get nowhere except a bit enlightened.

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In 1960 Steve Lacy wrote down advice given to him by the ever great Thelonious Monk. This list, entitled “T. Monk’s Advice (1960)” has come down amongst jazz players ever since. Jazz is an improvised form of music, but improvised does not mean “random”, improvisation comes from an agreed framework… very much like we improvise the RPGs we play. We agree on a framework, game rules, and we begin playing from there.

Today we apply T. Monk’s Advice to RPGs.

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How often per D&D session do you roll dice? There’s people who roll for everything and people who’d prefer never to roll at all. But, is there a sweet spot of how often should players roll?

If we think of rolling a success as a net positive for PCs, how many rolls can they expect to make before succeeding? If you’ve met that person who doesn’t like rolling because they might fail, have you considered maybe they should roll more often instead of less?

Today we talk about statistics and give plenty of hot takes on how rolling works in Dungeons & Dragons.

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Do you know what is the intended tone of the game you are playing? All games have influences, and all games are better at emulating specific themes, feelings and ways of play compared to others. Some are good at drama others are better at action. Some support heavy role play in their mechanics others are more of a tactical experience. But most use dice.

How does the dice influence the experience of the game? Today I compare the two RPGs I have most experience with The Veil and D&D and in the process I make a ton of hot takes of ways to run D&D.

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Emacs & org-mode is the definitive writing experience, it allowed me to organize my process, write, export to PDF and quickly make revisions. Yes, I am a developer, and yes Emacs is my IDE of choice, however, even if you are not, I think there’s a lot you can get out of using emacs, though it will take a large-ish amount of setup.

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