I like Planar Ally. It escapes the weirdness that comes with, say, fey spirits appearing as beasts within range in a single combat round. It’s a much more traditional version of conjuration, where you call upon creatures to come to you and have to persuade them to help you. Here are a couple of strong points about planar ally and why other conjuration spells are harder to run:

1. The creature summoned is not obligated to help you. You have to persuade it or find use in its nature (if it is, say, a mindless rampaging death beast).

2. If it does help you and it joins your party, it takes a share of experience. I love this. One of the biggest issues with necromancers and conjurers is that big groups of minions take forever to run in combat and give one player a lot of ‘screen time.’

Right now I am working on a ruleset that essentially takes the original wording and intent from the original set of D&D spells (published in Men and Magic and the Greyhawk Supplement) and translates those spells into 5th Edition terms. I found that there are quite a few spells in 5th Edition that have changed drastically from their roots with Gygax and Arneson.

In many cases, things that were ‘cool’ at the time have been watered down or put through so many iterations that they aren’t fun any more. In other words, each time a spell is published for a new edition of D&D, the authors decide to make changes — individually, those changes were made with good reason but their sum total amounts to something unfun and totally unrecognizable. The best example of this is Telekinesis.

Warning: this post is a bit of a reaction. Back when I decided to become a profession GM, the ‘call to action’ I had involved moving to a new place and starting up some new campaigns. Almost every single player had a poor experience finding a new game, especially those who tried to find their games online. This post is a little less applicable to starting up a game with a group of existing friends (though that poses its own challenges, namely a sometimes insurmountable disparity in commitment and the lack of distant respect a GM requires).

I found that there were three issues:

In many cases, promising games required potential players to get screened or even submit an application and character proposal.

Even when a player was able to get into a game, the games often failed after only a few sessions (at least partially related to: good GMs don’t post many games because their games don’t have high turnover while bad GMs are constantly starting new games and probably getting too comfortable frequently organizing new games).

If the game didn’t fail, the player didn’t find the group to be a good fit.

What a cruel joke, I thought. When I first participated in RPGs in college, my experience was poor enough with the normal challenges of group dynamics. Other people, it seemed, not only had to deal with that issue, but also with very unreliable games and an application process!

And were they ever there in the first place? Guns have never really been part of any of the classic D&D settings: Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Mystara, Nentir Vale, or the Forgotten Realms. In part, this was due to the insistence of the creators of D&D and their successors. Lots of other people have recorded and commented on Gary Gygax’s and Ed Greenwood’s and other luminaries distaste for guns in medieval fantasy, whether it was to keep 20th century war and culture out of their escapist children’s game, or because it didn’t make sense in setting where it was cheaper and easier to create a fire bolt just as deadly as a bullet propelled by black powder.

In GMing, you have two quantitative metrics: whether and how frequently players show up or not to your game (attendance), and how many players you go through in a given period of time (turnover). This deficit in data makes it hard to improve as a referee. You might hit all the boxes on the checklist but still perform poorly. Worse yet, you don’t know why.

In this blogpost, Craig from the Discord community answers the question “What’s your favorite style of orc?” His answer is an excellent commentary on the power of the ‘other’ as a literary trope (whilst acknowledging its racists roots), and the unique twist that a certain franchise added to their orcs (orks?) to make them unique and turn some tropes on their heads.

I had a conversation with game designer on Discord the other day. They asked for ideas on what kinds of genetic modifications soldiers of the future might have. I gave it a few minutes of thought, as well as some reflection on conversations I had in college with bioengineering students. The caveat, however, is that predicting medicine and science more than, say, 60 years in the future is pretty much impossible. Predictions tend to be expansions on ideas and science that already exist, and there’s no way of knowing what new ideas might become vogue 100 years from now. In essence, 1000 years and 10000 years are pretty much the same.

First off, here’s what I see as ‘problematic’ in terms of science fiction. A lot of the ‘genetic engineering’ and ‘supersoldier’ ideas are essentially power fantasies that aren’t grounded in the reality of combat.

The year 2020 will probably still linger in our memories long after I write this post. For the world it was a historic stress test on our governments, institutions, and our collective sanity. For me, it was a year of soul searching. I made several important decisions about my life: namely, to focus on writing and tabletop roleplaying games. I started out the year believing that I’d be able to make it work as a professional GM. After all, during my unsuccessful job hunt, I started and ran several enjoyable games, made a number of connections, and generally took advantage (for the first time) of living in the epically nerdy San Diego. What I didn’t foresee was the lockdown that’s now kept me inside and away from the gaming table for almost a year now.

We had to move to virtual tabletops. Whereas I was comfortable face-to-face…