Gelatinous Icosahedron

 Anyone who's played old school D&D is probably familiar with the potion of poison, one of the items which might be generated by random rolls on the magic item tables. Any potion found might be poison, up to 1 in 8 if only the Basic Rules were used, or a mere 2 in 100 when using the tables from the Expert Set. According to the item description, if any amount of the potion is swallowed, even a sip, the character consuming it must make a saving throw vs. poison or die.  I believe the potion of poison was meant to serve the purpose of risk, making players always a little bit apprehensive about any potions their characters might acquire during an adventure. I believe this in large part because no practical uses were even suggested for the potion of poison; it seemed to be included in the lists only as a "gotcha!" item. While uncertainty and risk are important parts of a good D&D session, it is always preferable to enable players to manage these for themselves, to make...

 The D&D wilderness encounter tables are a hot mess. That's the message from Eric Diaz at Methods & Madness , and he's absolutely right. It's a subject I've pondered a lot over the years, and I have some thoughts on the matter too.  The post linked above covers the problem quite well, and I'd encourage you to read it. In brief, the tables are both wildly dangerous to adventuring parties, featuring ridiculous frequency of very powerful creatures such as dragons, and the encounters often aren't even terrain-appropriate. My own two cents' worth in the comments was that many of the encounters end up being utterly pointless as well, such as sea snakes on shipborne adventures. The next step in finding a solution is to identify what we'd like to see.  Do we want random wilderness encounters at all? I'd argue that yes, we do, because hex crawls almost by nature consist of large swathes of unkeyed territory with nothing but a terrain symbol in the ce...

 Well, it's been months since I've written or thought much about D&D, and a lot longer since I've actually played it, but I've recently been mulling the idea of writing and publishing some sandbox adventure settings. In that vein, I've been thinking a bit about adventure design: specifically, encounters. Not combat encounters vs. roleplay encounters or anything like that, but the big picture way in which encounters are integrated into the matrix of space, time, randomness, and player agency that makes up the game. The encounter types listed below may be incomplete, but at least serve to illustrate how the different types of encounters serve different purposes. A good mix of encounter types ensures a balance between DM preparedness, unexpected twists and complications that enrich the game, and respect for player agency. Random: An encounter that occurs when and where the dice dictate, fixed neither in time nor space. It is procedurally generated during play by r...