Teaching Your Wife to Play RPGs: How to Bring a Non-Gamer — and Perhaps Shy or Unmotivated Player — Into the Game You Love Without Making Them Hate It

Can you teach your wife, girlfriend, best friend, family member or anyone you love to play your favorite RPG? It’s a risky proposition, as listener Dave points out in this week’s listener question: He wants to teach his wife to play D&D, and she’s agreed to give it a try, but he’s afraid that “if … Read more

WotC Changing D&D 5E Monsters and More – Are These the Updates the Game Needs?

At D&D Celebration, Wizards of the Coast held a Future of D&D panel discussion with Ray Winninger, Liz Schuh, Jeremy Crawford, and Chris Perkins about new products and changes coming to D&D 5E over the next year and beyond. Among the topics discussed were changes to the way monsters will be presented, balanced, rebalanced around … Read more

29 DM Ideas for Spicing Up D&D 5E: New Twists for Campaigns, Combat, Equipment, Magic and More!

DMing is all about bringing your ideas to the table, but some ideas reach beyond the story and dialogue to change the way the game is played. Today, 3 Wise DMs open a Pandora’s Box of DMing ideas and inspiration for D&D 5E. From campaign setting ideas to new weapon rules, combat formations, vampire and … Read more

Patrons, Powers and Punishments in D&D 5E: So Many Classes Get Their Powers From a Higher Power … But at What Price?

Patrons and punishments have been a part of D&D since 1st Edition’s paladins had to toe the line or get busted down to fighter status by an angry deity. But with so many classes drawing their powers from gods, devils and monsters in 5e — and not really getting any better deal than the wizard … Read more

RPG Weather, Puzzles and Ritual Challenges: 3 Ways to Make Your Campaign World More Immersive

How do you bring your campaign world to life? It’s a question lots of DMs and GMs ask from a lot of different angles. We’re all looking for ways to make sure our players have fun, but also have new experiences in the game that make it feel more like characters living out a story … Read more

Keeping Your Story Straight: How We Manage All the DM Details of Our RPG Campaigns

No DM’s plan survives contact with the players. Between remembering the story you’re trying to tell, the details you had to improvise, and the players’ actions (which may or may not have made sense), it can be hard to keep the details straight in your RPG campaign. How can you plan out the important stuff, … Read more

I’m on a Boat! Running Sea-Faring, Space-Faring and Other Ship-Based RPG Campaigns

When you take your RPG campaign to the high seas (or under the seas, outer space or anywhere else they need a ship to survive), all bets are off. Sure, you could run it like any land-based campaign using the ship for fast travel, but is that really what a ship-based campaign is all about? … Read more

Dragons: Why We Love Them and How We Run Them

Dragons are to D&D what Jerry West is to the NBA: The Logo. They’re the monsters so iconic that they’re literally part of the name. No other fantasy property has done as much or gained as much from its dragons. So, when you decide to put a dragon in your campaign, you know it has … Read more

How to Bring WrestleMania to Barovia: DM Dave’s Curse of Strahd Goes WAY Off Book With a Homebrew Wrestling PPV

Sometimes you want to change the game up completely, even if it’s just for the night. Maybe you want to have a night of gambling games, a carnival with an archery contest, a little football, or, like DM Dave’s Barovia, a werewolf wrestling match to put the WWE to shame! When you have that urge, … Read more

Strange D&D Homebrew: Knowing When, Where and How to Make Your RPG Campaign Weird Without Losing Your Players

DMs have some crazy ideas. And deep down, there’s nothing most of us want to do more than unleash those ideas on our unsuspecting players. The party is rolling along a totally normal campaign in a non-descript fantasy world, and suddenly, you’ve dropped a giant, soul-eating, boon-granting, Lovecraftian spaghetti monster into the center of it … Read more