Gelatinous Icosahedron

 While D&D combat has a pretty clear order of operations and economy of actions, outside of combat I've tended to play things fast-and-loose regarding sequence, timing, and number of actions. I wouldn't be at all surprised if many other DMs handle things similarly. There's nothing inherently wrong flying by the seat of your pants, if that works for you, but if timekeeping becomes a tangled mess and/or you have some very assertive players who tend to monopolize the game between combats while passive ones barely get a chance to participate, a more structured exploration sequence may help. The editions I've played (B/X and BECMI, mostly) do give some guidelines, but for most of my DMing career I've struggled with how to apply them. Below is a more detailed, but still hopefully simple, step-by-step procedure for dungeon crawling. 1. Party moves, either until its exploration movement rate is exhausted or a keyed location or other point of interest is reached.  2. Des...

 Traps have always been a staple of dungeon-delving adventures. There's more than one way to classify traps, but here I'll be looking at them according to their purpose in the dungeon, both in-fiction (i.e. the purpose they serve to their creators in the game world) and in-game (i.e. what they add to the experience for DMs and players.) Of course, there is a fair bit of overlap, and any given trap might fit into more than one general category.  HAZARD: Not truly a trap, per se, but some feature of a dungeon that presents a danger to explorers. Unlike a true trap, a hazard is not intentionally constructed, but functions in the game in a similar way. Hazards may be natural features, such as a sinkhole, an unstable pile of rubble, a pocket of toxic volcanic gas, or the result of deteriorating structures, such as a crumbling bridge or loose ceiling block.     Purpose:  In the fiction, being products of impersonal forces, they have no purpose per se. In a game sense...

So, I've decided on a new project: revamping the B/X spell lists to improve or replace seldom-chosen or un-useful spells and spells that are problematic for social/intrigue-style campaigning or world-building generally, add a few spells to fill gaps, and offer some alternatives for campaigns with less of an emphasis on combat (or at least on combat magic-users.) As I've been sifting through the lists and pondering changes, I've noticed some odd things about spell naming conventions. As one might expect from compilations of spells created by various authors at various points in time, there's no real unifying principle behind it. We have spells with wonderfully evocative names like Knock and Haste, which don't tell you what the spell does in so many words, but for which the association is easy to remember once you do know. We have blandly prosaic names like Wall of Fire, Water Breathing, and Remove Curse - exactly what it says on the tin, as it were. We have weirdly s...

 Maybe it's just a general symptom of middle age, but Christmas isn't what it was in the days of my youth. Out of all the Christmases leading up to this, my 49th, I remember those of the mid-80s to early 90s most fondly.  Those were the ones I've come to remember as the D&D Christmases. We had moved down from a few counties north at the end of 1985. Since we didn't yet have a home of our own here, we lived in my grandma's house, historically the site of Christmas gatherings going back to my earliest childhood, and a house which had at various points served as home for all the aunts, uncles, and cousins on my mom's side of the family. It turned out to be our home for several years, during which I discovered Dungeons & Dragons through a copy of the Moldvay Basic boxed set found by an aunt at a garage sale. I read the rulebook and the included copy of B2 cover-to-cover probably a dozen times before I suggested to the younger siblings and cousins that we try...

 Factions add an extra dimension to the role playing part of RPGs, allowing players to ally with some and play others against each other. Probably the most well-known examples of dungeon factions are the various humanoid tribes of the Caves of Chaos in B2: The Keep on the Borderlands. Not only is the opportunity for politicking, diplomacy, and subterfuge prominent in the module, but arguably a vital part of any viable strategy for dealing with all the orcs, goblins, bugbears, and other assorted nasties far too numerous for a party of beginning characters to tackle with brute force.  Factions in a dungeon or dungeon complex like the Caves of Chaos tend to be limited in scope (usually to the dungeon itself and possibly its immediate environs) so they're relatively easy to handle, but it's worth fleshing them out a bit so you can role play them with confidence. Here are a few details you might want to consider having ready to go in advance of actual game sessions: What does the f...

 When it comes to doing better in combat, there are a few ways a character or monster's battle effectiveness can be scaled up. For purposes of this post, I'm talking about the character or creature's actual inherent combat effectiveness and improvements in combat ability from gaining levels of experience, not bonuses from magical weapons and the like. Better attack rolls: The character "hits" more often. Each 1 point of attack bonus or decrease in THAC0 results in 5% greater average damage per round. The average damage per successful attack and the maximum possible damage in a round are unchanged. This is how it works for all characters in B/X D&D. More damage: Damage per successful attack is augmented, either by adding a flat number or by increasing the size or number of dice rolled for each attack. The chance to succeed at an attack is not affected. This method is used in BECMI's Weapon Mastery rules and to a lesser degree in AD&D's weapon spec...

 Weapon and armor restrictions by class are some of the most iconic features of D&D (particularly older editions. I'm not well-versed in 3e and beyond.) There are a few reasons for it, primarily game balance, but also in-fiction flavor, to depict a particular archetype in a class. Weapon restrictions are consequential in a few ways. In editions with variable weapon damage (or with optional rules for such in use) they limit the amount of damage a character can do in battle. A magic-user limited to dagger only is also limited to d4 damage, where other classes have access to d6, d8, or even d10 weapons. A cleric's restriction to non-edged weapons effectively eliminates the d10 and d8 weapons (those dice being mainly used for swords, polearms, and battle axes) and the d6 missile weapons, leaving only the d4 sling. Even if you're playing d6 damage for all weapons, weapon restrictions still have one important effect, as many others have already noted: it sharply limits who ma...