Hook and Chance

Make your players feel like masterminds, plan for the spells that threaten to throw a wrench in your mystery, and avoid groans at the final reveal. Also, we chat about the essential traits to help build a great detective character.

A good D&D game always benefits from rising tension, heightened stakes, and a grand finale. Knowing how a mystery story typically works and having some idea of where the party can go, who they can talk to, and when things are gonna start getting intense is essential. Without these story beats as a starting point, its easy to streamline to the solution, or have things drag out far too long.

Mystery adventures are some of the most complex you can run. This series of three episodes simplifies the process as much as possible while still allowing for mysteries that have the potential to surprise and feel like a great ride. In this first one we look at the essential ingredients you need to create in order to run a grand whodunit.

The lumbering hulk of rotting plant matter known as a Shambling Mound can be so very misused. Usually, it is simply used as a large block of hit-points to chip away at, at worst, it is a TPK waiting to happen. So how do we avoid this?

Keith Ammann, author of Live to Tell the Tale and The Monsters Know What They're Doing is here to explain how players can think a bit differently about their characters and their desire to survive. Using new concepts like Ability contours he explains how characters can lean on their strengths, position themselves in combat, and know how to escape deadly situations.

Friends is an often overlooked and criminally misunderstood spell, and it's easy to make this mistake. It doesn't sling poison or prevent certain death or create illusions in the minds of your foes, but the versatility of this spell deserves a second look. It can make your charming character an ace in the hole for every talky part. As a reminder, Friends gives you advantage on Charisma checks for a bit, then makes your target turn hostile towards you. And it's fun as heck, okay? If it's good enough for Obi-Wan Kenobi, it's good enough for you! Easy now.

Dragons deserve the dramatic and complex fights that keep parties talking about the time they barely escaped alive. How would you go about writing such an encounter? Sounds like art. Could amazing encounters be systematized? Also, the Unbreakable Anthology is awesome... that is all.

Dragons are fearsome, dragons are big but that doesn't inform how they behave. Preparing and knowing the personality traits of your dragon will will inform their portrayal and ultimately insures your grand reveal doesn't fall flat.Taking a look into some of the core traits exhibited by dragons in fiction and breaking down those common behaviors allows us to study how they might behave.

Dragons have an incredibly vast history, mindbogglingly big. But if we look at the fact that dragons are pretty much an amalgam of all the real animals that have scared humans forever, then we've got something to work with, and draw ever more details from.

What if we didn't just drop puzzles into D&D, but played it a little more like the great puzzle games? By taking some simple rules from game design, we can improve our encounters, giving players the satisfaction of overcoming some seriously tricky situations.