Character “alignment” is an strange concept with an interesting history. But I want to skip the history this time and just talk about how I think about it my table. Specifically I want to talk about PC alignment. For NPCs, I don’t tend to think about it very much—except for celestials and fiends. I didn’tContinue reading “What “Alignment” means to me”
Category Archives: Rules
DCs between PCs
One more house rule that I have adopted and so far like—and one more where credit to Noam is necessary—covers interactions between PCs. Specifically those social interactions where there’s no evident opposed check. To provide some context, one of my goals is to enable players to play high-Charisma characters even if they aren’t such greatContinue reading “DCs between PCs”
System Mastery and System Completeness
One subset of the folks I play with regularly is excited about trying new things, and this started when we decided to try Pathfinder 2nd edition. I never played D&D 3.5e, or PF1e, so it was new to me—it’s also a different fork of history, since Pathfinder branched from D&D after 3.5e. Now it’s evolvedContinue reading “System Mastery and System Completeness”
My Version of 5e
My friend Saterade said something interesting the other day: that every DM running 5e really needs to take the game as a template and turn it into their own system. Just like every Forgotten Realms or Eberron out there is its own distinct version of a universe, our house or table rules, our homebrews, theContinue reading “My Version of 5e”
Bounded XP?
As a general rule, I don’t like XP, and have moved to using milestones in 5e games. There are a bunch of reasons: It strongly encourages combat solutions to encounters. Managing missing players is harder. It’s a pain to keep track of, especially for non-combat encounters, where it feels especially arbitrary. Being 7 XP fromContinue reading “Bounded XP?”
5-Foot Step in 5e
Recently I tried borrowing 3.5e’s 5-Foot Step rule for 5e combat and so far I really like it. The way I introduced it is: if you move no more than 5 feet on your turn, you don’t provoke attacks of opportunity. My motivation came from a couple of places. First, the primary two characters IContinue reading “5-Foot Step in 5e”
James DM 