Category Archives: RPGs

The results in this report are from an online survey of 445 respondents from 33 different countries. This survey is not representative of all who play tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) but is designed to be representative of engaged Dungeon World players; it does not do a good job of capturing the opinions of people who played Dungeon World in the past but no longer play it. Respondents were recruited from four sources: 285 responses (64%) are from the Dungeon World subreddit 91 responses (20%) are from the PbtA subreddit 68 […]

After running close to 100 5e sessions, I’m ready to move on. It was fun and got me back into the hobby in a major way. But I have grown increasingly frustrated with 5e, and its attempt to carefully simulate everything fantastic. I find battles to be tedious and boring. The 5e Player Handbook is over 210,000 words, and I have players who’ve read it all and want to integrate from the other books and various Unearthed Arcana. At this point I own the PHB, MM, DMG, as well as […]

The goal of this survey is to provide feedback to the OSR and RPG community on what Level 1-3 spells are considered most useful. The results can then be used to create shorter spell lists and player aids – or to inspire custom spell lists for other designs. Spell descriptions take the form of “Name [120′, 2] Effect” showing “[range in feet, duration in turns]” before the magical effect. Spell descriptions © Zenopus Archives, http://zenopusarchives.blogspot.com. Used by permission. The survey was fielded from November 10, 2019, through June 1, 2020. […]

The very first role-playing game was the original Dungeons & Dragons boxed set, with its three 36- to 40-page booklets (Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures) presenting the idea that RPGs should go big. Of course, the second RPG was Tunnels & Trolls, which fit everything into one 42-page booklet. Still the belief has been that RPGs need to go big, with the average length of main books about 250,000 words. So it may surprise you to learn that RPGs can be less than 0.1% that size. […]

DM: You can’t see any towers. The redwoods here are hundreds of feet tall.Cleric: As we fly above the trees, I use Locate Object to try to find the same type of stone used in the other towers.DM: The cleric follows his senses till it brings you to a pond among the redwoods. The pond is about six hundred feet in diameter. The wind whispers softly through the trees.Artificer: Let’s land about 120 feet away from the pond, just in case.DM: OK.Artificer: Can someone give me Water Walk?Wizard: I will.Artificer: […]

Back in November, one of my players asked me to run a one-shot campaign for her son and his wife, as one of them always DMs, and they’ve never both played in the same game. I asked them what they wanted and they said that they would like “to have a one-shot with high-level characters, like level 15 or so, and possibly mostly a dungeon crawl with puzzles and games and things.” I’d never run a session for higher than level 7, so after first thinking about writing my own […]

My group played our first remote D&D 5e session last night. As it happened, my notes (written before I knew this would be online) called for them waking in the middle of a cavalry battle between centaurs and horsemen. It was certainly a lot easier to manage with a virtual tabletop! We had problems with the Roll 20 app’s audio and switched to JoinMe halfway through: that went much better. We will do that going forward. Unfortunately, virtual D&D brings all of the fun of conference calls to your gaming […]

As I’ve written elsewhere, when I started my current homebrew O5R campaign, I generated a 10×10 hex map using Hex Describe. Even though it is powered by nearly 2,000 tables (!), I found myself missing the cast of characters that populate a town. I came up with a design goal of, within a single page, emulating the keep from The Keep on the Borderlands (buy it!) as a useful starting location for the adventurers, but adding more elements of intrigue. Since Hex Describe is open source, and you can append your own tables […]

Last night I got two hours of O5R play out of one sentence of my session notes! That sentence: A dead man, an arrow in his eye: you find no food or weapons but a saddle and shield. Reacting to my players’ actions, I ended up roleplaying the dead man (thanks to Speak with Dead), the grass (!) his body was found in (thanks to Speak with Plants), and his murderer. The key resource I used during play was a random name generator I had written at the start of the campaign, when the situations […]

I’m amazed by the variety of implementations of spellcasting in OSR systems. I asked OSR Reddit what the problems are that these new implementations are trying to solve, what the most popular approaches to spellcasting are, and people’s preferences. I distilled the discussion into the following analysis. Perceived problems with OD&D— Boring Vancian magic isn’t magical enough Difference between spell levels and PC levels Set spell lists Doesn’t suit certain settings and types of campaigns Types of spells— Set spell lists: By spell level By player level (e.g., level 2 […]