1st Edition Advanced Original Basic Dungeons and Dragons for Experts in Swords Without Masters
Author: Travis Miller
Travis writes, games and blogs.
The Entertainment Business is Hard
If someone I know has good taste tells me, "Fonda Lee's books are really great, you should read them." Then I probably will. I might anyway, she's published by Orbit, one of my favorite publishers. She was nominated for a Nebula and won a World Fantasy Award for best novel. They typically don't hand those …
Why?
Why am I writing this blog? First. It is an exercise for me to meet deadlines. You may have noticed that I've published a short post almost every day for about two months. Accepting that I may have to ship something that is "good enough" maybe not as good as it could be but good …
Trust
Building and maintaining trust is important for a game master. If the players trust you to build a setting, an adventure, a scene that is going to have a satisfying pay off, then they might go along when they aren't sure where your hooks are taking them. If the players trust you then they may …
Just A Game
I hear/read, "It's just a game," from time to time. It is usually meant as a dismissive statement. This "elf game" hobby isn't all that important, not really. Except it is, to me. When I was 19, I was in an emotionally deep dark hole. I was depressed. Horribly depressed. You see, I had joined …
Concept First, Mechanism Second
The conceptual situation or encounter has primacy in the games I run. I describe the scene with no reference to mechanisms of the game what so ever. The players tell me what they want to do. If the character is a thief and they want to climb a garden wall and what I want the …
All About the Combat
Occasionally, I will see a critique of a particular character class in 5E that puzzles me. It will say something like, "Such and such is broken/underpowered/boring because they don't compare favourably to the other classes, during combat.” I never read a complaint that the person playing the barbarian character is bored when the thief is …
Grumpy Wizard 
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