Many Hands Make Fight Work
There’s a term you may have heard in the context of tabletop games, usually in the context of combat-focused tactical games, but not always, and sometimes in the context of videogames or TCGs, which is the idea of Action Economy. But what is, an action economy?
4e for Two
What if D&D but fewer players?
Backgrounds are Weird
Hey, do you know how character Backgrounds work in 4e? Because chances are you kinda don’t know, and I’m a great big 4e nerd and I’m not sure how they work either.
When You Crit
I have never found feats or abilities that amplify the effect of critical hits to be exciting in 4th edition. Why, though? Ehhh, a couple of reasons.
Alternative Rewards
So okay, Alternate Rewards. They’re kind of a problem.
Group Flirts
The skill challenge represents one of the many pieces of 4th Edition D&D technology that was underappreciated in its time and misunderstood in hindsight.
Distributing Abilities
Ability scores in Dungeons & Dragons are one of the game’s many mechanical systems that float atop a liquid surface of questionable justifications. They’re a perfectly serviceable set of dials to use to define a character, they do a job and they create a lot of thematic hooks you can use, but also, under the hood, they are not sensible at all.
The Warlock is Alone
It’s a well-worn meme that Warlocks and Paladins are different only in that one has an employer, and one has a sugar daddy. Notably, recognise that the Warlock’s the one with a contract, but the Paladin’s the one with a code of conduct.
4e: Deploying Monster Types
People say that 4e D&D was ‘only good for tactical combat,’ which I don’t agree with, but I can understand the feeling when you consider it was the first time that it made the combat system kinda work. Part of how it worked was that rather than treat monsters as if they were all generic spots on a continuum, monsters were balanced based on general formulas of things they could do and ways they could be represented, and part of that was recognising that some types of monster were best suited to particular types of role.
The Yakuza Theme
There’s a chance if you played 4th edition, you never even knew Themes were a thing. They were introduced in a campaign sourcebook as a way to flesh out characters under level 10, to give more of that kind of granularity you might want if you say, belonged to a particular organisation, or had something […]