Aaron The Pedantic

Whew, I'm tired. I stayed up all night.  Literally.  But it was an incredibly productive night.  Anyway, you don't care about that.  I finished the rough draft of the rough draft of my new Christmas adventure, Murder 'Neath the Mistletoe.  It's a B/X style adventure inspired by LotFP's No Rest For The Wicked, my love for old Santa stories, and my fucked up desire to turn something wholesome into something twisted.  The players arrive in a tiny village with a dark secret.  Every four years, the villagers sacrifice one of their own to a coven of hags in exchange for peace and prosperity, but this year, the sacrifice survived.  Imbued with the power of the cruel hags, this Santa knock-off is coming to town to lop off some heads. This particular adventure is much more dungeon light than my usual sorts. It basically works in three phases. Phase I: Investigating the town. Phase II: Hunkering down to survive the blizzard or venturing out to seek survivor...

 THE QUESTION HATH BEEN RAISED!  The answer shall be found.  Hopefully. As anyone familiar with my blogging, my tweets, or my videos will know: I am mostly an amalgamation of a ton of incomplete thoughts.  Occasionally, those thoughts find something that makes sense, then they spit it out for others to see it and revise as needed.  Here's what I've got for magic items right now. 1. Risk vs. Reward This should be no surprise, especially to fans of old school gaming.  One of the things that really lights our fire for gaming is the desire to have to make difficult choices, and to see the ramifications of those choices.  This is the essence of role-playing (as opposed to telling a story/acting).  Here's your situation, what do you do?  Magic items have the capacity to introduce risk vs. reward in two ways.  Earning the magic item can be an exercise in risk vs. reward, and using the magic item can be an exercise in risk vs. reward. Perhaps th...

I've been utterly disappointed in Wizards of the Coasts' attempt to relegate psychic powers to subclasses. I understand why they're doing it. To put it simply, 5e is, much like 4e and 3e before it, designed around the concept that there should be balance between PCs of a given level. To tip the scales by adding more abilities for one PC while the other PCs are somewhat less equipped would feel unfair. So, by tying it to one's subclass, you're getting new flavorings that are more or less equivalent to what everyone else is getting. That's boring and uninspiring .  What if, truly in the vein of older editions of D&D, we added the potential for all PCs to have these abilities, but it's completely left to chance? This means that what you roll at character creation is MUCH more important. It means that you end up with a new dimension to add to your game. The rules will be familiar enough to be easily incorporated, but fresh enough to make their addition a sig...