Sean Does Games

Tales about everyone's first dungeon-mastering experience have been popping up on Twitter lately. It's really been too long for me to remember the details of my first attempts so it has been fun reading the stories of fellow gamers. This past week, I even had the privilege of witnessing my daughter run her first Dungeons and Dragons 5e game. Well, to be honest, this wasn't her first attempt. Her first try was a couple of years back. It didn't go well. The players were a mix of junior-high boys and girls. Most of them were only partially interested in the game. After a series of unfortunate events, YouTube was on, the phones were out, and the game was forgotten. My daughter was understandably disappointed. She wanted to play. I agreed to run a campaign for her and any of her friends who still wanted to give it a try. That campaign is still going, albeit intermittently. It even involves another parent. My daughter was (and still is) grateful, but she couldn'...

I've been toying around with the idea of blogging some tips on managing initiative in a D&D 5e game. Given the July 10th release of Unearthed Arcana's  Greyhawk Initiative , I thought now might be a good time to go ahead and do just that. Hopefully, other readers will chime in and add their ideas as well in the comments. Natural 20s and Natural 1s I am a really big fan of the concept of Natural 20s and Natural 1s in 5e. For those not familiar with D&D, you use a 1d20 for almost every roll you make to accomplish a task (adding any appropriate bonuses you might have to the result). Rolling a 1 on the d20 is referred to as a natural 1. It is always a failure. Well, it's not just a failure. It's a particularly BAD failure. Rolling a 20 on the d20 is a natural 20. It's not just a guaranteed success but a particularly stylish, interesting, or down-right awe-inspiring success worth bragging home about. Sure, there are game mechanics that are affected by ...

The following is the final part in a set of blogs about Theophraxis, the gnome gunslinger I play on  Time2TableTop's  Dungeons & Dragons 5e   The Infinity Tower  live stream. This story picks up where the previous blog left off. Enjoy my ramblings and catch us every Tuesday night 6:30PM Pacific time on  Twitch . The Story Continues If you recall, Grand Ol' Tree was a gnome burrow full of life, hard work, harder play, and deep tradition. It thrived for centuries until orc armies laid waste to it. It's all too common for tightly knit communities decimated by war to scatter across the lands, their populations never to be reunited. This was not the case with the Grand Ol' Tree burrow. In fact, the terrible event only strengthened the bond among its survivors. As a community, they escaped to Tregeria. When they resettled, they did so together. They called their new home New Grand Ol' Tree. This wasn't some misplaced nostalgia for a lost land. I...