Fifth-Edition D&D’s Original Lead Designer Calls Out the Game’s “Secret Error” That Remains Today

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In fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, characters and monsters calculate the difficulty class (DC) number needed to save against their spells and powers using the same formula: 8 + proficiency bonus + ability score modifier. That means a 7th-level wizard and a CR-7 mind flayer, both with Intelligence 19 and a +3 proficiency bonus, both force their foes to make a DC 15 save against spells like fireball and powers like mind blast. But according to the designer who led the creation of fifth edition, the monsters were never intended to use the same formula as characters, making the uniformity a “secret error in fifth edition.”

The design strategy of using the same math for both monsters and PCs traces to D&D’s third edition, where characters and creatures shared the same rules foundation. This brought some benefits: In theory, designers could create consistent monsters by plugging attributes like size, type, target challenge rating, and so on into formulas to get the creature’s statistics. Monsters and characters could share customization options like feats and class levels. Third edition sets an effective character level (ECL) for some monsters. The ECL matched the creature’s power to a particular level of PC. A player could play a monstrous PC by just treating it as a typical character of the effective level, and then leveling up from there.

This symmetry suffered drawbacks too. In a discussion, third-edition designer Monte Cook says, “We had to make NPCs and particularly monsters work exactly like player characters. I get it. I understand why that’s cool and why that’s important, but boy that became cumbersome. You could look at some high-level monster and go through his skills and just say, ‘Oh, mistake.’ I’m not thrilled with the fact that I created a game where it was so easy to pick nits.”

Most monsters only survive about three rounds, so unless players love monstrous PCs and DMs enjoy customizing creatures with class levels, the cumbersome math rarely pays off. Worse, the math may result in monsters that prove less fun to battle during its typical three rounds in play. This sort of shared formula became the fifth edition’s secret error.

In a post on Bluesky, fifth-edition lead designer Mike Mearls explained that monsters were not supposed to include their proficiency bonus when calculating the DCs needed to save against their powers. “Monsters were supposed to have DCs…based on their flavor and design.” Monster designers would simply choose saving throw DCs that matched the creature’s lore, while making the creature an exciting foe for the level of character it typically faced. By locking save DCs to a strict formula, designers lost the flexibility to choose the best numbers for fun and flavor.

At lower levels and lower challenge ratings, using the save DC calculation for characters and monsters works well enough, but at higher levels, the steady rise of save DCs that add proficiency bonuses as high as +9 creates trouble. DCs become so high that only characters both proficient at the save and with a high ability score bonus enjoy a realistic chance of success. In a high-level party, that math dooms about two-thirds of the characters to failure. Against a mind flayer’s DC 15 save, a typical party of Intelligence 8 and 10 PCs must hope some of the heroes stand out of the mind blast’s 60-foot cone.

The climactic encounter of Phandelver and Below shows how this dynamic can lead many parties to a total party kill. (This example includes minor spoilers.) The showdown pits a single CR 15 monster against a party of 12th-level characters. According to the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide, this encounter rates as somewhere between low and medium difficulty. The saving throw math says something else. The creature’s CR leads to a +5 proficiency bonus backed with a +6 ability score bonus, setting a DC 19 save. The monster’s mind blast power targets creatures of its choice within 60 feet of it. Targets who fail an Intelligence save take damage and become stunned for 1 minute. Typical 12th-level wizards and artificers make that save about 55% of the time; druids and rogues make it about 30% of the time, and everyone else gets a slim 1-in-10 or 1-in-20 chance of success. Some groups need luck for just one character to escape the blast without cartoon stars circling their head. Stunned characters can redo the save every turn, but the barbarian and everyone else who dumped Intelligence still needs to hope for a natural 20—and to hope the monster doesn’t recharge mind blast on a 5 or 6.

The scarcity of characters with good Intelligence saves and the brutality of the stunned condition makes this example particularly harsh, but the dynamics hold true even for Dexterity and Constitution saves. As levels increase, saving throws for characters who lack proficiency swing toward impossible.

How does a mistake like that happen? “Earlier this year I was at a game design talk, and while mingling with other designers, someone asked about the hardest part of design. Every single person gave the same answer—communication and coordination.”

Some members of the fifth-edition design team likely preferred to make characters and monsters share the same formula for calculating saving throw DCs. Perhaps some on the team still favor this consistency. But even if they all agree on the secret error, after 10 years of fifth edition, it’s too late to change.

As a house-rule remedy for fifth edition’s secret error, Mearls suggests adding the proficiency bonus to all a character’s saves rather than just the few with class-assigned proficiency. Obviously, this rates as a major change at the game’s foundation, but it would make fifth edition play more like D&D’s early editions where every character improved at every save as they added levels.

25 Years Ago I Posted My Wish List For D&D. How’s it Going?

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At Gen Con in 1999 Wizards of the Coast revealed plans for a third edition of Dungeons & Dragons, scheduled for release in 2000. The upcoming release would preserve the “essential look and feel” of D&D while introducing intuitive changes like a unified d20 mechanic where high rolls meant success. Free t-shirts teased the upcoming changes.

During that 1999 announcement, I thought back to 1989 and how AD&D’s second edition rules addressed few of the game’s weaknesses. I remembered the disappointment that I had felt. I wrote, “Second edition had some virtues: It consolidated and organized the rules; it featured leaner, more readable writing; and it dumped some of the clumsier bits like giving distances in inches and dividing rounds into segments. But mostly the second edition just repackaged the hodgepodge of rules accumulated since the first edition. Almost all the game’s inconsistencies and clunky bits remained.”

Since 1974, the roleplaying games that followed D&D featured countless innovations that improved play, so in 1989, D&D’s rules looked as dated as a Model T. The 1999 announcement previewed something different: a third edition that redesigned the game from its foundation. That promise fired my excitement. I posted a wish list of the changes to D&D that I hoped to see. Now 25 years later, how many of my wishes came true? My original post appears in italics.

1. Unify the game mechanics.

Want to find out if you hit? Roll high on a d20. Want to jump a chasm? Roll low. Want to use a skill? Roll high. Want to use a thief skill? Roll low on a percentile. Listening at a door? Who can remember? Look it up. The third edition fails if it fails to make sense of this.

Third edition delivered the mechanic where players add an ability modifier and other adjustments to a d20 roll, and then compare the result against an AC or difficulty class to determine success. This mechanic remains at the heart of the game and ranks as the single biggest refinement over the game’s 50-year history.

Wish granted.

2. Smooth the power curve for magic user advancement.

Playing a 1st-level mage means spending your adventure waiting for your big moment when you can cast your single, feeble spell. The situation improves little until level 5 or so. Some say that this balances the class against the extreme power of high-level spellcasters. I say it’s bad design. Low-level casters should have more than one spell. If this unbalances the class, then reduce the power of high-level casters.

While third edition kept low-level magic users in the game by granting them bonus spells based on intelligence, wizards still surged in power at higher levels, eventually overshadowing other characters. Fourth edition D&D solved the problem, matching the power of different classes by giving every class the same allotment of daily and encounter projects. The uniformity left some gamers unhappy, and that included the designers. “I’d never wanted to use the exact same power structure for the wizard as every other class,” said lead designer Rob Heinsoo, “But we ran out of time, and had to use smaller variations to express class differences than I had originally expected.”

Fifth edition reverted to a magic system that resembled the Vancian magic of older editions, but the game made three changes that check the power of high-level wizards and other spellcasters.

Many spells now require their caster to maintain concentration to keep their magic going. Critically, a spellcaster can only concentrate on one spell at a time. Now rather than layering haste, invisibility, fly, blur, resistance, and a few others, a caster must pick one.
Spells cast by higher-level casters no longer increase in power simply based on the caster’s level. Now, for example, to increase the damage of a fireball, a wizard needs to spend a higher-level spell slot.
Compared to earlier editions, spellcasters gain fewer spells per day, and much fewer high-level spells. In the third edition, a 20th-level wizard could cast four spells of every level including 8th and 9th level. In fifth edition, a 20th-level wizard gets 14 fewer spells per day, and only one 8th- and one 9th-level spell. Sure, the fifth-edition caster enjoys more flexibility, but far fewer slots.

The damaging cantrips introduced in fourth edition also let low-level wizards do something magical every turn, rather than spending most combats flinging darts like exactly zero magic users in our fantasy imagination.

Wish granted.

3. Drop THAC0.

To the folks boasting that they have no problem with THAC0: Don’t spend too much time lauding your math skills. We all can do the addition and subtraction in our heads, but the system remains a clumsy and counter-intuitive vestige of D&D’s wargame roots.

In drafts of the original D&D game, a 1st-level fighting man could figure the lowest d20 roll needed to hit by subtracting the target’s AC from 20. New fighters needed a 20 “to hit armor class zero,” and with each level they gained, their THAC0 improved by 1. The to-hit tables that reached print lacked the same simplicity, but descending armor classes remained. So when the second edition dropped “attack matrix” tables in favor of THAC0 numbers, the game returned to its roots. Still, THAC0 used negative numbers for especially tough ACs, made mental math more difficult, and forced a counter-intuitive concept on players.

Second-edition designer Steve Winter said, “There were all kinds of changes that we would have made if we had been given a free hand to make them—an awful lot of what ultimately happened in the third edition. We heard so many times, ‘Why did you keep armor classes going down instead of going up?’ People somehow thought that that idea had never occurred to us. We had tons of ideas that we would have loved to do, but we still had a fairly narrow mandate that whatever was in print should still be largely compatible with the second edition.”

Third edition dropped THAC0 and descending armor classes in favor of a target to-hit number and to-hit bonuses players added to their roll. Suddenly, the game became more consistent and intuitive.

Wish granted.

4. Give complete rules for magic schools and specialization.

The second edition mentions magic users who specialize, but the core rules fail to give rules for magical specialists other than the example of illusionists.

Third edition included rules for wizards specializing in each school of magic. The 2014 version of fifth edition built on the idea by giving specialists abilities specific to their school.

Wish granted.

5. Give rules for different clerics for different deities.

The second edition mentions variant priests for other deities, but the core rules fail to give rules for priests other than clerics. Why shouldn’t a priest of a god of the hunt use a bow? Why shouldn’t the priest of a thunder god be able to cast a lightning bolt? Why should the rules force the DM to answer these questions?

In the third edition, clerics chose two domains such as the air and war domains suitable for a god of thunder. Domains brought extra powers and domain spells like chain lightning. By fifth edition, cleric domains turned into full subclasses with accompanying abilities. Alas, gods of the hunt still lack support.

Wish granted.

6. Make spell statistics consistent.

Playing spells in AD&D either demands that you memorize the details of each spell or that you waste game time thumbing through the PHB. Why can’t most ranged spells have consistent ranges? Why can’t most area-of-effect spells affect the same area? Similar spells should be grouped and should share similar numbers for range, duration, area of effect and so on.

The fourth edition of D&D granted this wish, but I also learned that part of D&D’s charm came from spells like polymorph, phantasmal force, and wish that no cautious game designer would pen. Unlike earlier editions, fourth edition provided spells with effects that confined their effects to grid and to a tightly defined set of conditions. Often spells no longer worked outside of combat. Even fireballs became square.

These changes simplified the dungeon master’s role by eliminating judgment calls over debates like whether a wizard could toss an earthworm above their foes, polymorph it into a whale, and squash everyone flat. The fourth-edition designers aimed to make the dungeon master’s role easy—something a computer could handle. But this approach discouraged the sort of ingenious or outrageous actions that create unforgettable moments. D&D plays best when it exploits a dungeon master’s ability to handle spells, actions, and surprises that no computer game allows.

Although fifth edition returned to spells that demand a DM’s judgment, the spells feature more careful and uniform descriptions than in the game’s early editions. Credit this improvement to a card game.

When the designers of Magic: The Gathering faced the problem of bringing order to countless cards, they used templated text: they described similar game rules with consistent wording imposed by fill-in-the-blank templates. Today, the patterns of templated text appear throughout modern D&D’s rules.

Early in the development of third-edition D&D, Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR. Skaff Elias had served as a designer on several early Magic sets and ranked as Senior Vice President of Research and Development. Skaff felt that the upcoming D&D edition could fix “sloppiness in the rules” by using templated text. Skaff and Wizard’s CEO Peter Adkison told the D&D design team to switch the spell descriptions to templated text, but the team kept resisting his directives.

Eventually, the D&D team readied the release of a playtest document that still lacked templated text. They claimed rewriting all the spell descriptions according to formula would prove impossible because hundreds of spells would need templating in 48 hours to meet their delivery deadline. Nonetheless, Adkison and Skaff took the challenge themselves, working through the night to rewrite the spells and meet the deadline. Even after that heroic effort, the rules document that reached playtesters lacked the templated descriptions from the CEO and the Design VP. The design team had simply ignored their bosses’ hard work.

The failure infuriated Adkison. He lifted Jonathan Tweet to the head of the third-edition team. Designer Monte Cook remembers Adkison’s new directive: “If Jonathan says something it’s as though I said it.” Unlike the TSR veterans on the rest of the team, Tweet had started his career by designing the indie roleplaying game Ars Magica and the experimental Over the Edge. As a member of the D&D team, he convinced the team to adopt some of the more daring changes in the new edition.

7. Make spell power consistent.

Spells of the same level suffer from wildly different power in game play. This means that each spell level includes a few powerful spells that see constant play and many weaker spells that are forgotten. Worse, spells like stoneflesh pose game balance problems.

As long as D&D adds spells, the game will fall short of making their power consistent. The 2024 version of the fifth-edition rules makes changes to nearly 200 spells from 2014. Some changes affect power levels by changing their damage or healing dice, by adding concentration, or even by substituting a different spell for an old name. The changes bring the power level of spells closer to other spells at the same level. Still, silvery barbs remains unchanged even though players widely regard it as broken. And the completely rewritten conjure minor elementals spell joins the list of broken spells often nerfed by house rules.

8. Shorten one-minute rounds.

Who besides Gary Gygax accepted minute-long rounds as plausible? I recently reread the second edition’s rationalization of why someone can accomplish so little in a minute, but found the explanation as silly as ever. While the length of time simulated by a round makes little difference on actual play, I still prefer some sense underlying the mechanics.

Original D&D specified that a 10-minute turn consisted of 10 combat rounds, making rounds one minute long. Nonetheless, the D&D Basic Set (1977) specified 10-second combat rounds. Editor J. Eric Holmes based the set’s shorter round on house rules like Warlock and The Perrin Conventions common among his circle of California gamers. The West Coast community tended to rely on combat experience earned in fights staged by the Society for Creative Anachronism. To them—and to most gamers—10 seconds seemed like a reasonable time for an exchange of blows. Meanwhile, Gygax stood loyal to D&D’s wargaming roots and favored the 1-minute rounds that let D&D fights mix with Chainmail miniature battles where armies of combatants needed minutes to mount attacks. In the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, Gygax spends a quarter page defending 1-minute rounds against critics who argued that in a minute real archers could fire a dozen arrows and real fencers could score several hits. The second-edition Player’s Handbook dutifully spends four paragraphs justifying the 1-minute round by explaining how a character could easily need a full minute to drink a potion. So much for drinking a potion as a bonus action! When the third edition switched to 6-second rounds, few mourned the 1-minute round.

Wish granted.

9. Simplify experience.

Totaling experience shouldn’t require a spreadsheet. Why bother having exacting formulas for combat experience when non-combat experience remains largely up to the DM’s judgment? Newer games use extremely abstract experience systems because calculating experience adds no fun to a game.

Unlike the original D&D and AD&D rules, second edition avoids setting a standard experience point (XP) system for the game. Instead, the Dungeon Master’s Guide reads like a draft presenting two methods: Half the text suggests that DMs improvise awards based on how well players foster fun, show ingenuity, and achieve story goals. Half suggests DMs award XP for beating monsters. The book cautions against awarding XP for treasure. “Overuse of this option can increase the tendency to give out too much treasure.” In the end, the text offers little guidance. “The DM must learn everything he knows about experience points from running game sessions.” Obviously, when I griped about point totals that required a spreadsheet as if that were the only option, I forgot the current edition’s indecisive XP rules.

In practice, the best experience system matches the style of play that gamers want.

For games centered on looting dungeons, D&D’s original XP system worked brilliantly by rewarding players for claiming treasure and escaping the dungeon with as much as they could carry.

For games focused on stories that resemble an epic fantasy tale, awarding experience for overcoming obstacles works better. This builds on the essentials of storytelling where characters face obstacles to reach their goals. Most second-edition players chose to award XP for defeating monsters. This method based XP awards on the game’s most frequent and quantifiable obstacles, namely monsters, so the method avoided relying on arbitrary decisions. However, it fails to account for games without much combat or where smart players reach goals without a fight.

Fifth edition offers an XP system based on beating monsters while suggesting awards for overcoming non-combat challenges.

As a flexible alternative to grant XP for overcoming obstacles, DMs award XP to parties when the reach their goals—the Dungeon Master’s Guide calls these goals “milestones.” Many DMs skip the point totals by simply granting levels for meeting goals.

For gamers who stick to points, the totals still add up to thousands, high enough numbers to merit a spreadsheet. Those high numbers remain as a vestige of the original D&D game where one gold piece brought one experience point.

10. Publish fewer rule books.

All the optional rule books make the second edition too sprawling, too heavy, too expensive, and too intimidating. Plus, if you use all the options, then you hardly play the same game.

Ever since TSR Hobbies learned that D&D fans would buy books of campaign lore and character options, the D&D team faced a temptation to publish too many D&D books. As sales sagged in the second-edition era, TSR tried to bolster revenue with more and more books. When the third edition’s sales boomed, Wizards of the Coast tried to capitalize by publishing more books.

But even the most eager gamers can only spend or play so much, so inevitably those additional books meet indifferent players and languish on store shelves. Rows of D&D books in game stores tend to intimidate potential new players who wonder how much they need to buy to start playing and how much they need to master to join existing players. The editions of popular roleplaying games typically end with game store shelves glutted with product. By fourth edition, the D&D team knew this pattern, but they still published hardcovers almost monthly.

Fifth edition stands as the first to stick to a slower release schedule that may avoid the risk of overwhelming fans with products. Until 2018, Wizards of the Coast only published three books a year. Still, the number of D&D hardcovers released annually has climbed to four, then five. Even as a D&D enthusiast, I no longer find time to play or even read every release. Count the wish as granted, but perhaps only through 2021 when five books a year started reaching stores.

11. Make healing spells consistent with the hit point concept.

I can accept the rational behind the gain in hit points a character receives with each level: A 10th-level fighter cannot actually survive 10 times more injury than he could at 1st level. Instead, his combat skills enable him minimize the damage from a stab that once would have run him through, so instead of a fatal wound, the 10th-level fighter suffers a minor cut.

Fine. But why does a cure light wounds spell have a negligible effect on the 10th-level fighter when the same spell can bring a 1st-level fighter from death’s door to perfect health?

I admit this issue is more of a peeve than a serious problem with the system, but a bit of consistency would make the rationale for hit point advancement much easier to accept.

Fourth edition granted this wish. In the fourth edition, rested characters gained a limited number of healing surges, and then healing magic let characters trade surges for healing. Because the number of points healed by a surge grew with a character’s hit point total, magic like healing potions cured wounds in the same proportion at every level. Fourth edition’s treatment of hit points and healing ranks as one of the edition’s best innovations, but it needed the edition’s hit point math to work, so fifth edition returned a scheme where a 1st-level cure light spell offers minimal healing to a high-level character.

Never Have Monsters Make Checks—Just Let the Players Roll

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Dungeons & Dragons started with slightly different rules for monsters and player characters. In the dungeon, doors that players left open always swung shut, but “doors will automatically open for monsters, unless they are held shut.” Mostly though, the same rules applied to heroes and monsters, a carryover from the game’s wargame roots. In the wargames that led to D&D, players competed to win, while the game master—the referee—just interpreted the rules. Even in early D&D games, players sometimes battled each other in the race for treasure.

By D&D’s third edition, the game’s symmetry reached a peak. The game rules served as the physics of the game world. A monster’s statistics built from the same rules that applied to player characters. By sharing a rules foundation for characters and creatures, the third edition opened customization options like feats and class levels to monsters.

More recent editions loosen this symmetry, so monsters no longer work like characters. Why should they? Monsters serve a different purpose and rarely survive longer than five rounds. Nonetheless, characters and non-player characters follow identical game physics of d20 tests and DCs during play.

But some roleplaying games break this symmetry so that for non-player characters, the game master makes different rolls or no rolls.

Players enjoy rolling dice. In D&D, that makes attacking more fun than casting spells like sacred flame where the DM gets to roll a save. Rules like the Cypher System used by Numenera and The Black Hack variant of original D&D have players roll to determine the outcome both when they attack and when they get attacked. Monsters skip attack rolls in favor of players making defense rolls to avoid hits. Some games feature even bigger differences between the mechanics for players and game masters. In the Daggerheart roleplaying game, monsters attack with a simple d20 roll instead of the more complicated 2d12 Duality roll reserved for players. Only player rolls produce Hope and Fear.

D&D’s symmetrical system of saving throws and attack rolls has proved too entrenched to swap monster attacks for defense checks. But some symmetry in the game seems more ready for elimination. Start with contests.

In my ten years playing hundreds of fifth edition games, I played exactly one contest. It came when an intellect devourer did its thing: “The intellect devourer initiates an Intelligence contest with an incapacitated humanoid.” A few other monsters like nothics and poltergeists also start contents. Why don’t these creatures’ targets just make saving throws instead? Sure, the numbers work a bit differently, especially because contests can skip proficiency or use different proficiencies, but usually when players try to avoid harm, they just roll saves. The fifth edition design typically favors consistency over fussy exceptions.

Despite the rarity of contests, characters match their abilities against monsters’ abilities all the time. Mainly, the rules distill common match ups to a single check. This simplification comes most often when a creature hides. “The DM compares the Dexterity (Stealth) checks of anyone hiding with the passive Wisdom (Perception) score of each creature on the opposing side.” Instead of rolling both abilities in a contest, the check’s DC comes from adding 10 to a Wisdom (Perception) modifier.

This D&D rule benefits from a change that adds a dash of asymmetry so that players always make these checks. Players like to roll dice, especially when the roll decides their character’s fate. If a PC hides, the player rolls a Dexterity (Stealth) check against a DC set by the monster’s perception; if a monster hides, the player rolls a Wisdom (Perception) check against a DC set by the monster’s stealth plus 10. Tales of the Valiant takes this approach. Monsters get stealth and perception DCs for players to roll against.

D&D includes lots of creatures proficient in Stealth. When these creatures can ambush, they show the traits that make them more interesting than a claw/claw/bite sequence. When monsters attempt to ambush a party, the stealth DC toolkit works. Set a DC based on the ambusher’s stealth score and add a +5 to account for the advantage of advanced preparation. When the time comes for the monsters to spring, have all the players roll Wisdom (Perception) checks. Those who succeed avoid becoming surprised.

The technique of adding 10 to a modifier to set a DC can replace any contest. Players always roll and their opposition always sets the DC. If the opposition has advantage or disadvantage, modify the DC by another +5 or -5.

Contests offer different odds than ordinary checks. A contest’s two dice gives bigger swings in the range of outcomes. So, with lucky rolls, a creature with no bonus can win a contest against someone with a +11 modifier. When that +11 adds up to a DC 21, a check with no bonus always fails. How often does such a large mismatch appear in play?

Also, the average roll on a d20 is 10.5 rather than 10 and rolls that tie the DC go to the person rolling. Both these factors give a little edge to roller, improving their odds in an even match. But D&D plays at kitchen tables rather than at casino tables. In play, a 1-in-20 edge and a rounding error that adds 2.5% hardly matters. Also, we could adjust the DC to offset the edge or ignore it. When players make the rolls and gain the edge, they have no reason to quibble.

Daggerheart vs. the MCDM RPG vs. D&D: A Playtest Comparison

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If games to suit every play style and new games bringing fresh ideas makes a golden age, then the best time for gamers is now. In the past weeks, I’ve played preview releases of two upcoming games: the MCDM RPG championed by Matt Colville with lead designer James Introcaso, and the Daggerheart RPG championed by Matt Mercer with lead designer Spenser Starke. Both games play in the same genre and style as D&D, but each aims to prove more fun for certain styles of play. The MCDM RPG seeks to recreate some of the tactical play exemplified by fourth edition D&D in fast-paced, cinematic battles. Daggerheart targets a more narrative, rules-light style that fosters heroic moments and chances for players to reveal their characters.

Core mechanics

The core mechanics of these games target 3 common gripes about the core mechanic of D&D.

A lack of degrees of success or failure limits the potential outcomes of a check.
Players experience a feel-bad moment when they miss and lose their opportunity to do something interesting on their turn.
The swinginess of D&D’s d20 mechanic, which can make experts look inept and zeros look like heroes.

Degrees of success

In Daggerheart’s core mechanic, players roll a pair of 12-sided dice and add the numbers. If the total exceeds a target number, then the roll succeeds. Aside from the different dice, this resembles a d20 check, but Daggerheart adds a twist. One of the d12s is marked as the Hope die and the other the Fear die. The die that rolls higher adds Hope or Fear to the result. Whether or not a roll succeeds, a roll with Hope brings a boost in the form of a Hope token players can spend to benefit their character. A roll with Fear brings complications, potentially success at a price. The game master gains a fear token they can spend to make the character’s predicament more difficult. Hope and Fear create a range of heroic moments and setbacks that players and game masters can use to inspire storytelling.

Games with such success-with-complications, fail-forward mechanics weigh game masters with the extra creative burden of improvising complications to pair with success. For combat rolls though, Daggerheart gives GMs who gain Fear a menu of complications to select. The first complication is that players lose initiative, something this post will discuss later.

The MCDM RPG bakes degrees of success into the game’s power roll mechanic. The higher the sum of 2d6, the better the degree. They even have names for the degrees: tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3. Perhaps they considered reaching to older games like Marvel Super Heroes for tier names like good, excellent, and remarkable, but for one type of rolls tier 1 means a small success, and for another type, tier 1 means failure. The game features two types of power rolls: ability rolls, which correspond to D&D’s attack rolls, and tests, which correspond to D&D’s ability checks. Ability rolls don’t have a chance of failure, which leads to the second common gripe levelled at the D&D’s core d20 mechanic.

No missed attacks

The MCDM RPG tries to eliminate the down moments when a player misses an attack and wastes their turn. All ability rolls succeed, with an outcome that determines a degree of success and sets an amount of damage. Without damage rolls, the system plays faster. No one likes to lose a turn to a miss, but in play I found that the lack of failure in attack rolls made combat feel less compelling. The reason comes down to something psychologists call intermittent reinforcement where a behavior like rolling attacks earns inconsistent and unpredictable rewards. Intermittent reinforcement built the casinos along the Las Vegas Strip and it’s why no one would play a slot machine that returns exactly $0.97 every time you drop a dollar. To be fair, the version of the MCDM RPG I played used a different combat mechanic where players just rolled damage, so even the biggest roll on a formula like 2d6+6 yielded just 5 more points than average. The new mechanic allows bigger results for big rolls and undoubtedly plays better.

Swingy d20s

Both the MCDM RPG and Daggerheart adopt core mechanics that have players rolling two dice and summing the total. In the MCDM RPG it’s 2d6; in Daggerheart it’s 2d12. Both games have a good reason to avoid the single d20 roll in D&D. When you roll 2 dice and sum the results, numbers in the middle become much more common, creating a bell curve. When you roll just one 20-sided die, extreme results prove just as common as average results. That leads to the sort of wacky outcomes that frequently seen in D&D games where the mighty thewed barbarian slams into the door, rolls a 2, and bounces off. Next, the pencil-necked gnome wizard kicks the door, rolls an 18 and it crashes open. With a d20 roll, the roll swamps the influence of a character’s abilities. Some d20 games try to reward expert characters by giving them very high modifiers. A character with something a +15 skill bonus stands out from one with no bonus, but then to challenge that character, GMs need difficulty classes like 30, which become completely unreachable for most characters. So high-level adventures start including impossible obstacles for parties that lack the right sort of character. (See Why D&D’s d20 Tests Make Experts Look Inept and How to Make the Best of It.)

By adding two die rolls to get a bell curve of results, expert characters start to feel like experts who reliably succeed, and average characters need extraordinary luck to accomplish difficult tasks. All that happens without forcing the game to set difficulties that make tasks impossible for average characters.

Advantage and disadvantage.

Gamers love how fifth edition’s advantage and disadvantage mechanic streamlines all the fiddly +1 and +2 modifiers included in earlier editions of the game. The new edition also removes past rules for how these modifiers stack. Instead, advantage and disadvantage provide a simple, compelling alternative. It’s a blunt adjustment, but considering how swingy d20 rolls are anyway, the coarse mechanic hardly seems to matter in play.

To me, and apparently to the designers of the MCDM RPG and Daggerheart, the worst part of advantage and disadvantage stems from how it never stacks. If a character has a consistent way of gaining advantage, other decisions, tactics and character traits that grant advantage stop mattering. The game feels flat. This is why cover—an easy advantage to consistently gain—typically imposes a -2 penalty rather than imposing disadvantage on attackers.

In Daggerheart, advantage and disadvantage don’t entirely wash out. If a character has two sources of advantage and one source of disadvantage, they still gain one advantage die. Because of the 2d12 bell curve, small modifiers make bigger differences, so advantage means just rolling an extra d6 and adding the results.

In the MCDM RPG, the 2d6 rolls provide an even narrower range of numbers, so the design team settled on modifying the roll with up to two edges of + 1 or two banes of –1. That feels less exciting than rolling extra dice, but it worked best in testing.

Initiative

Both Daggerheart and the MCDM RPG attempt to improve on D&D’s cyclical initiative system.

In the MCDM RPG, characters can go in any order as decided by their players. The game master takes a turn after each of the character’s turns. In D&D, when a solo monster rolls a poor initiative, the entire party gets to unleash their best spells and attacks first, potentially turning an exciting fight into a quick execution. The MCDM RPG’s alternating initiative prevents such a letdown while providing a more consistent experience.

Daggerheart goes for a looser system that feels even more freewheeling and narrative. Players can take a turn whenever they like. One player can even take multiple turns in a row. I suspect the designers intend to enable heroic moments where characters can string actions into sequences that feel cinematic without the game’s turn order interrupting each moment with 10 minutes of everyone else’s turns.

This goal doesn’t always happen, because a roll with Fear gives the next turn to the GM, but with a bit of luck the game can unlock cinematic, heroic moments.

Naturally, some gamers worry that such a loose system will encourage players to hog the spotlight, and certainly that fear seems valid. I’ve played games where one player with the party’s best interests at heart tried to help us “win” by dominating the action like a superior basketball player might try to help the team by taking every shot.

Still, D&D became a better game when designers stopped trying to fix obnoxious players. Most players strive to share the spotlight. However, the real trouble is that both MCDM and Daggerheart’s systems threaten to slow the game’s pace during combat.

Before third edition, most D&D groups used side initiative, so the party and the DM each rolled a die and the side with the best roll went first. During a party’s initiative, they decided the characters’ turns to act. Most tables rolled initiative every round, and that added some exciting uncertainly, but all this added friction. Third edition’s lead designer Jonathan Tweet says, “It takes forever to go through the round because no one knows who’s next and people get dropped.”

The third-edition team decided to try a rule that originated in some West Coast D&D variants like the Warlock rules devised at Caltech and the Perrin Conventions created by future Runequest designer and D&D contributor Steve Perrin. That variant was cyclical initiative where everyone rolls to establish an order and the order stays the same throughout the fight. “It feels more like combat because it’s faster. By the end of the turn, by the end of the 5 hours playing D&D, you’ve had way more fun because things have gone faster.”

Fifth edition’s initiative system removes decision making to make play faster. Unlike in past editions, players can’t even delay their turns. The designers imposed this restriction to speed the pace of combat.

Designer Monte Cook says, “If you can look at something that happens 20, 30, 50 times during a game session, and eliminate that or decrease it hugely, you’re going to make the game run faster, more smoothly. That idea is now a big part of my game designer toolbox.”

Combat escalation

In D&D, major battles typically start with characters unleashing their most powerful spells and abilities, sometimes turning a climactic showdown into an anticlimactic beat down. But if the foes survive and the fight wears on, depleted characters start grinding with basic attacks. Instead of rising excitement, the game sputters. Both the MCDM RPG and Daggerheart give characters resources that can replenish or even increase during combat. In the MCDM RPG, various heroic resources like rage can increase; in Daggerheart Hope can increase. Especially in the MCDM RPG, this helps create a sense of escalating action in battles. Meanwhile, a growing stack of Fear tokens can lead to a growing sense of peril.

The MCDM RPG even adds a resource called victories that makes characters stronger as they press on during an adventuring day. Instead of encouraging a 5-minute adventuring day, the system encourages players to test their limits like real heroes.

Resolution transparency

When I played Daggerheart, my character Garrick included a feature that seemed intended to foster looser, more narrative play. His battle strategist feature made him especially good at combat maneuvers like shoves, grapples, and trips. However, the playtest lacks any rules for these sorts of maneuvers. Perhaps I’m shackled to an outdated mindset, but I feel more comfortable playing in a system where I understand how my character’s actions will be resolved. If every use of an ability means that the GM and I must improvise a fair way to resolve the action, then I’m inclined to skip delaying the game for that discussion.

Ability scores

Both Daggerheart and the MCDM RPG use ability scores that parallel the scores used in D&D. Both systems take advantage of their clean-sheet designs to replace some of the scores’ names with more suitable terms. For example, both systems replace Charisma with Presence, a term that removes the implication of comeliness, leaving just force of personality. Daggerheart makes another interesting revision. It replaces Dexterity with two scores: Agility and Finesse. In D&D, Dexterity proves too valuable, so players build quick characters and the PCs in play show less variety. By turning Dexterity into two scores, Daggerheart gives each score a more equal value in the game. Daggerheart drops another score that D&D makes too valuable: Constitution. Every D&D character is alike in boasting a stout Constitution, and that means the score does little to make characters distinct. Instead, in Daggerheart, a character’s hit points mainly depend on their class.

Death

D&D makes dropping to zero hit points easy but dying—except at first level—nearly impossible. This makes difficult battles into unintentionally comical scenes where characters keep flopping to the ground, presumably at death’s door, only to be repeatedly revived. The rules even inspire a counterintuitive strategy where a player might refuse to heal friends until they lay dying because damage below 0 heals for free. This robs any sense of peril from going near death. Players with a dying character worry more about losing a turn than losing a character. If no one bothers to pour a potion in your character’s mouth, then rolling a death save instead of taking an action provides D&D’s ultimate feel-bad moment.

When a D&D character defies the odds and really dies, the game tends to make the big moment into the anticlimactic result of a series of lost turns and bad death saves. We want characters to die in heroic blazes of glory that feel cinematic rather than by bleeding out into the dirt.

Both Daggerheart and the MCDM RPG introduce rules for death and dying that vastly improve on D&D by giving characters a shot at a heroic finale.

In the MCDM RPG, a character with 0 or less Health becomes unbalanced. They can still act but most actions cost them 5 more Health. If the negative Health value reaches half their Health maximum value, they die. This challenges players to decide how much they wish to press their luck. Should a character risk a blaze of glory or shrink back to safety? Characters die because they dared for glory.

Daggerheart gives characters with no hit points a choice of death moves:

They can take an action, gain an automatic critical success, and then die.
They can risk their lives on a die roll. If they roll Hope, they regain Hit Points; if the roll Fear, they die.
They can drop unconscious and “work with the GM to describe how the situation gets much worse.” This option risks permanently reducing your character’s capacity for Hope by one. New Characters can accumulate up to 5 Hope tokens. If that capacity ever drops to 0, the hopeless character must end their journey.

When designers create D&D’s sixth edition, they should look to Daggerheart and the MCDM RPG for inspiration, but until then these rules count as the best ideas to steal for your game.

Durable first level characters

In D&D, first level characters are a durable as soap bubbles, so new players typically enter the game at its most dangerous. New players who lose characters often have a bad play experience and decide D&D isn’t the game for them. They might be wrong, but they walk away anyway. Both the MCDM RPG and Daggerheart make new characters durable, a feature that D&D gained with fourth edition and lost with fifth. If you’re listening to me now, you might be a D&D enthusiast who lost characters in their first game and kept playing, so you might argue that I am making a problem out of nothing, but that’s survival bias that ignores all the potential fans who quit because their characters died during their first session. None of those folks are reading this post now.

As for my first games of the MCDM RPG and Daggerheart, both games left me ready for more.

From B1 to Pinebrook: Every D&D Adventure That Includes DM Advice and What They Taught

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Over the 50-year history of Dungeons & Dragons, the game has changed enough that some gamers prefer the early versions of the rules to duplicate the play style of 1974. Have the qualities of good dungeon master changed too? For a tour of DM advice over D&D history, I sought the D&D adventures that included advice, from In Search of the Unknown (1979), to Peril in Pinebrook (2023), and pulled the best, worst, and most dated guidance. Most advice remains timeless, revisited in print over the decades, so this post only mentions guidance when it first appears.

B1 In Search of the Unknown (1979) by Dave Carr

Most adventures that include advice aim to help new DMs through their first session. Later printings of the 1977 Basic Set packaged In Search of the Unknown as a start. Originally, this Basic Set just included unkeyed dungeon maps that DMs could cut apart and rearrange into different configurations. Following the original dungeon design standards, new DMs could just roll for monsters and treasure to stock the map. B1 keeps some of this learn-by-doing approach. The adventure included vacant locations along with separate lists of monsters and treasures to pair with the open locations.

Designate a caller

One player in the group should be designated as the leader, or ‘caller’ for the party, while another one or two players can be selected as mappers (at least one is a must!).

Early on, DMs proved much scarcer than players so groups often included 8-12 players and D&D co-creator Gary Gygax ran sessions for as many as 20. Designating a caller to speak for the group helped speed play. For more on the lost role of mapper, see The Dungeon Mapper: From Half of D&D to a Forgotten Role.

Make the game enjoyable and challenging

The DM’s foremost concern should be to provide an enjoyable game which is challenging to the players. A good DM does not attempt to influence player actions or channel the activity in a particular direction. Although you may set up situations to challenge players, you must understand that you are not their adversary, nor are you necessarily out to defeat them. However, if your players abandon caution or make stupid mistakes, let them pay the price—but be fair.

As Dungeon Master, you are the game moderator. This means you set the tempo of the game and are responsible for keeping it moving. If players are unusually slow or dilly-dally unnecessarily, remind them that time is wasting. If they persist, allow additional chances for wandering monsters to appear—or at least start rolling the dice to make the players think that you are doing so.

In the 1979 Dungeon Master’s Guide, Gary Gygax suggests speeding characters by rolling dice behind the screen, mainly to hint at the threat of wandering monsters. As random encounters fell out of favor, I figured this advice became outdated, but a recent adventure discussed in this post, The Hidden Halls of Hazacor (2018), recommends the same trick. For some of my advice on the subject, see Getting Players Moving, Especially When No One Wants to Drive.

Lastly, it is important to remember that the Dungeon Master is the final arbiter in his or her game. If players disagree with you, hear them out and reasonably consider their complaint. With human nature as it is, players will undoubtedly attempt to try to talk you into (or out of) all sorts of things; part of the fun of being a DM is this verbal interplay. But in the end, what you say is what goes.

T1 Village of Hommlet (1979) by Gary Gygax

By 1979, D&D publisher TSR had split Advanced Dungeons & Dragons from the original game. As an introduction to AD&D, Gygax penned Village of Hommlet, a module that added a village as a home base complete with non-player characters the players might not kill. For more on creating NPCs that players might not kill, see How to Create Loveable Non-Player Characters While You Supercharge Your Sex Appeal. (That title is not pure click bait; the post really does explain how to supercharge your sex appeal.)

Roleplaying NPCs

The persons met at the inn, along the road, and so forth, are you; for the Dungeon Master is all-monsters, NPCs, the gods, everything. Play it to the hilt. Do it with flair and wit. Be fair both to the characters and to yourself. Be deceitful, clever, and thoroughly dishonest when acting the part of a thief. Be cunning but just when in the role of a warding ranger. Actually think of it as if the part you are taking is that of a character you are playing, and act accordingly, but temper actions with disinterest in the eventual outcome and only from the viewpoint of that particular role. Wearing two, three, or a half dozen or more different hats is challenging, but that is part of being an outstanding DM.

For more on roleplaying NPCs and modelling good roleplaying for players, see Most Advice for Encouraging Role-playing Stinks, But I Found the Good Stuff.

B2 Keep on the Borderlands (1979) by Gary Gygax

In 1981, Keep on the Borderlands replaced B1 in the Basic Set. The adventure reprises the familiar advice, but Gygax adds a lofty pep talk for novice DMs.

As DM you are to become the Shaper of the Cosmos. It is you who will give form and content to all the universe. You will breathe life into the stillness, giving meaning and purpose to all the actions which are to follow. The others in your group will assume the roles of individuals and play their parts, but each can only perform within the bounds you will set. It is now up to you to create a magical realm filled with danger, mystery, and excitement, complete with countless challenges. Though your role is the greatest, it is also the most difficult. You must now prepare to become all things to all people.

If all of this seems too difficult, never fear! Just as your players are learning and gaining experience at D&D play, so too will you be improving your ability as a DM. The work necessary to become a master at the art is great, far greater than that necessary to be a top player, but the rewards are even greater. You will bring untold enjoyment to many players in your role as DM, and all the while you will have the opportunity to exercise your imagination and creative ability to the fullest. May each of your dungeon adventure episodes always be a wondrous experience!

Roleplaying monsters

When the players experience their first encounter with a monster, you must be ready to play the part fully. If the monster is basically unintelligent, you must have it act accordingly. Make the encounter exciting with the proper dramatics of the animal sort – including noises! If the encounter is with an intelligent monster, it is up to the DM to not only provide an exciting description but also to correctly act the part of the monster.

B10 Night’s Dark Terror (1986) by Jim Bambra, Graeme Morris and Phil Gallagher

In the 80s, the D&D line sold in a series of boxed sets. The Basic Set started players with dungeon adventures, and then the Expert Set expanded the game to the wilderness. Night’s Dark Terror helped introduce players to the great outdoors. This adventure rates as one of the best ever.

Fudging rolls

Adventuring is, above all, about enjoying yourself, and sometimes in order to do so it is necessary to overrule some dice throws. It is your job as DM to give your players an exciting and fun time, relying entirely on the dice is not always the best way to do so—they are an aid, not a means in themselves. But be discrete—you don ‘t want your players to get the idea that you are pulling any punches!

No other adventure suggests fudging die rolls, but when Peril in Pinebrook (2023) suggested that DMs play to avoid killing player characters, the recommendation took heavy criticism from some gamers. That adventure appears later in this post.

B11 King’s Festival (1989) by Carl Sargent

By 1989, most of the earlier introductory adventures lapsed out of print, so TSR started a new set with B11 King’s Festival.

Description and the senses

Never forget that you are the eyes and ears of the player characters during the game. Players are wholly dependent on you to tell them what their PCs see, hear, and so on. Good DMs are able to convey the feel and atmosphere of an adventure, the thrills and scares, by using good descriptions of what actions are taking place and what the PC can see around them.

A good DM details more than simply what PCs see. Don’t forget noises (scurrying vermin, voices, whistling wind, owl hoots, the scraping of something on stone-is it metal, chitinous claws, or something even more horrid?), smells (food, garbage, the reek of a filthy ogre aiming a club at a PC), and tactile senses (“you feel hair rising at the nape of your neck,” or “the stone feels cold and slimy as you touch it”).

For more, see Narrating Your D&D Game: The Essentials and How To Make Descriptions Vivid and Evocative.

DDA2 Legions of Thyatis (1990) by John Nephew

Legions of Thyatis continued the line of B-series adventures that started with B1, but TSR feared the high module numbers hurt sales, so they restarted the series with DDA1 and DDA2.

Characterizing NPCs

One quick way to characterize an NPC is to visualize him as an animal, and picture that animal as you describe and play him. Another way to create stock characters is to use foils, or opposites. One example is the wimpy, fast-talking thief teamed up with a hulking mountain of a thug.

Winging it

“Winging it” means running an adventure without a detailed script or area key. Like all skills, doing it will be easier after you’ve tried it a few times. When winging a plotted adventure, just identify the main turning points of the plot; how the players get there is less important than the fun they have doing it.

Don’t worry at first if the encounter sends the party away from the main plot—you can practice steering them back to it! Players depend on you dropping clues to guide them, and they can easily get lost if they miss something vital. Don’t panic; keep giving them chances to get on the right track until they connect, if your first clues were too subtle. If they don’t connect, you can decide after the session whether you want to get them back on track or modify the adventure to go in their direction.

If the player characters scatter, think ahead to the next point in your plot at which you can bring them all back together. Try to do this as soon as possible; it’s most important to have all the players in the game, for player boredom is certain death for an evening’s fun.

Finally, you may have a situation where things have gone out of control. In such cases, stopping the game for a few minutes to sort things out is perfectly okay.

WGA4 Vecna Lives! (1990) by David Cook

Unlike all the prior adventures on this list, Vecna Lives! targeted experienced DMs. However, this module aimed to create a more structured story and a more horrific mood than a typical D&D romp.

Story beats

Allowing the player characters to succeed against a seemingly major villain, deadly trap, or a puzzle increases their confidence. This victory may be followed by a stinging defeat or the discovery that their accomplishment was only a small part of something greater and more powerful.

This technique must be used sparingly, however. You don’t want to take away all your player’s accomplishments or they will get discouraged. Wait until they are overconfident and cocky, then give them a reverse and it will remind them that things are not as easy as they seem.

Building tension

To make your players sweat, you must let them know they are in danger before anything actually happens.

Which creates more tension—the player characters open the door and discover the monsters, or the player characters hear a strange noise on the other side before they open the door? In the second case, the players suddenly stop and have to judge the amount of risk. They know something is there, but don’t know what.

The trick is to give your players hints that they are in danger without revealing enough for them to avoid that danger. In movies, this can be done by showing the audience the threat (the monsters lurking behind the door) but not showing it to the hero (about to open the door). This is a little harder in a role-playing game, since players are both audience and heroes.

You can use foreshadowing techniques to some extent. Fleeting, incomplete, and inaccurate glimpses of the major villains will put characters on their toes. The characters can discover Vecna’s grim handiwork just moments after the fact. Ancient manuscripts suggest the full extent of Vecna’s power. Even his Hand and his Eye, as powerful artifacts, only suggest the full extent of Vecna’s power.

Eye of the Wyvern (1999) by Jeff Grubb

Eye of the Wyvern and its twin adventure Wrath of the Minotaur both teach the game using sections with titles like “Funky Dice,” “The Physics of a Gaming Session,” and “The Fine Art of Winging It.”

The adventures even include scripted text for the DM to read to new players who apparently have no idea what activity awaits them.

“What we’re going to do here is tell a story, a story that you’re going to help create. Each of you has a character: a fighter, a wizard, or a rogue. The story takes place in a world filled with monsters, treasure, and adventure. I’m going to be the Dungeon Master, or DM. I’ll describe what your characters see, and you’re going to tell me what your characters do in response.“

Dead characters

The adventure gives advice for character deaths that I’ve never seen before or since. “Just replay.” in video games gamers routinely replay bad outcomes often, but on the tabletop the suggestion feels like a violation of the social contract. Perhaps replaying should not feel like a transgression, especially with a table of new players.

With some lucky dice rolls for the ghoul and some unlucky ones for the characters, the ghoul might be able to paralyze and defeat all the characters if it decides to stay around and fight. This might be a cruel thing to do to the characters (and their players), but it would be a good way to show the players how dangerous a monster like the ghoul can be. (And you can always back up and start the adventure over, or just replay the scene in the library, if you want to give the characters another chance.)

Sock puppets

Eye of the Wyvern includes ravenous little lizard-gremlins called wyverlings, and Grubb gives DMs fun advice for playing them while using your hands as puppets.

One easy prop to use to show wyvernling action is to hold up your hand, thumb in front of the palm. Touch the ring and middle fingers to your thumb and extend the whole outward. You now have a rough approximation of a wyvernling head, which you can use to demonstrate all types of wyvernling activity. Sock puppets work, too, but this is good on the fly.

Crypt of the Smoke Dragon (1999) by Jeff Grubb

Despite already publishing two starter adventures in the same year, TSR later printed a third, free intoduction also by Jeff Grubb. Crypt of the Smoke Dragon uses a “demo version” of D&D that only requires d6s. It includes 3d6 rolls to hit and for ability checks. Plus, none of the foes have parents, so it meets another of my starter adventure rules. (See 6 Things to Include in a 1st-Level D&D Adventure.) It even includes a (smoke) dragon boss battle.

Make the adventure your own

When the heroes try something that isn’t covered in the text, just make it up! Even better, make something up in each scene so that the adventure is uniquely your own. That’s the fun of the D&D game.

Call to adventure

Crypt of the Smoke Dragon gives each pregenerated PC a motivation to go adventure even though the players will proceed just because they sat for a D&D game. One seeks the destruction of evil, one treasure, one knowledge, and one just feels loyal to the other PCs. For more on motivating adventurers, see The D&D Adventures That Stumble by Missing the Hook.

H1 Keep on the Shadowfell (2008) by Bruce Cordell and Mike Mearls

The fourth edition’s introductory adventure, Keep on the Shadowfell, makes subtle change that marks a big improvement. The 1999 introductory modules included four characters, three male and one female. This adventure leaves the names and genders of the pregenerated character blank so players set a gender. Too bad all the PCs’ illustrations appear male.

Way back in 1987, I embarrassed myself by creating a batch of male pregenerated for my event at Gen Con. A woman sat down and asked if any of the characters were female.

Hint: If you ever create characters for other players, always leave the gender unspecified. The (hopefully) ambiguous names I used for my last batch of PCs include Doc (cleric), Lucky (rogue), Sparky (wizard), Sprig (druid), Moxie (fighter), Roamy (Ranger). I could have left the names blank, but making names proved too much fun.

Make the adventure your own, part 2

You want to create a seamless world that seems both deep and exciting. You can accomplish this by adding story elements to the game when the opportunity arises.

Perhaps you think Wrafton’s Inn needs a bard stroking a lyre by the fire as he sings of Sir Keegan’s tragedy. Or perhaps you want to add flavor to a mundane object, such as the wyrmpriest’s necklace from the Kobold Ambush encounter.

Anything you can do to add your personal touch to an adventure makes it that much more distinctive and memorable to your players. Immerse them in the story, and you’ll all be rewarded with a unique experience.

The adventure recommends making NPCs distinct by giving them an accent or favorite saying, showing them with a favorite thing like a lucky coin or pet cat, or adding a personality-related adjective like “greedy, bored, suspicious, tired, enthusiastic, sly, nervous, dumb, zealous, and so on.”

Helping indecisive players

Sometimes when you ask players what they want to do next, they won’t know. If this happens, try to move them in a certain direction by asking a leading question. For example, if players spend a long time after the kobold fight considering what to do next, you can ask, “Are you ready to continue toward Winterhaven?”

This advice works for novice DMs running their first adventure, but if the players have already decided to travel to Winterhaven, you can typically let their decision stand without revisiting whether they want to continue. To break through indecision while giving players a better sense of autonomy, list their most promising three options, and then remind them that they can chose an entirely different action. See The Best DM Tricks for Helping a Party Make Choices.

Lost Mine of Phandelver (2014) by Richard Baker and Chris Perkins

Fifth edition’s introductory adventure, Lost Mine of Phandelver, still rates as one of the best for the game’s current version.

Don’t let rules questions stall the game

When in doubt, make it up! It’s better to keep the game moving than to get bogged down in the rules.

Be consistent. If you decide that a rule works a certain way in one session, make sure it works that way the next time it comes into play.

For advice on delegating rules questions, see Delegate to run better role-playing game sessions by doing less.

It’s a shared story. It’s the group’s story, so let the players contribute to the outcome through the actions of their characters. Dungeons & Dragons is about imagination and coming together to tell a story as a group. Let the players participate in the storytelling.

Make sure everyone is involved. Ensure every character has a chance to shine. If some players are reluctant to speak up, remember to ask them what their characters are doing.

This reverses the early advice to designate a caller to speak for the party.

Read the table

Pay attention. Make sure you look around the table occasionally to see if the game is going well. If everyone seems to be having fun, relax and keep going. If the fun is waning, it might be time for a break, or you can try to liven things up.

Cloud Giant’s Bargain (2016) by Teos Abadia

When an Acquisitions Incorporated game streamed live to theaters, audiences received Cloud Giant’s Bargain as a perk. Although the adventure works for character levels 5-7, it also seeks to encourage fans of live play to run their first game.

If you are a new DM, it is perfectly normal to feel a bit apprehensive before your first session. Just remember: players need DMs to play. What you are doing is valuable and coveted. You don’t need a perfect understanding of the rules or to have Chris Perkins’ improvisational skills for players to have a great time. When in doubt, make decisions that you think the players will enjoy. The more often you run games as a DM, the easier it gets!

See Why Faking Confidence Makes You a Better Dungeon Master.

Name tents

Create a name tent by taking a note card or similar piece of cardstock and folding it in half. Open the fold to a right angle, so that it forms a display tent when the edges are placed on the table. Give one to each player and have them write their character’s name, race, and class on each outer side of the tent. This will allow you and the other players to remember character names and important details.

For advice on name tents and more, see 11 Great Dungeon Master Tips Revealed at Winter Fantasy 2020.

Going off script

If players lose sight of their goals or start chasing red herrings, the adventure recommends luring them back. “One thing to remember is that players often respond to something exciting, interesting, or profitable.”

An old school approach to failure

Unlucky dice can always turn against characters, however, allowing them to be overwhelmed. Defeat is always a possibility in Dungeons & Dragons-but that’s what makes victory so sweet.

The Hidden Halls of Hazacor (2018) by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

Most introductory D&D adventures come directly from the TSR or Wizards of the Coast. After all, D&D’s publisher stands to reach virtually all new DMs first. Nonetheless this independent adventure, The Hidden Halls of Hazacor, gives first-time DMs an adventure stocked with guidance. And the adventure stands out for being the first and only adventure to give advice for some situations that have vexed DMs since 1974. The adventure targets kids and the writing aims for youngsters, but the advice works for any age.

Dealing with murderous treasure hunters

When some new players start playing a game that allows any choice of action, they relish the chance to shatter society’s rules of behavior, often in ways that disrupt the game for players who want to work together without making war with villagers.

Characters can be arrested in the stronghold for getting into fights, stealing from NPCs, climbing the stronghold walls, or trying to break into shops or apartments. So if any players talk about their characters wanting to do such things, it’s up to you to convince them it’s a bad idea.

Describe how there are guards everywhere in Purdey’s Rest, patrolling the streets and the market court. But also, characters will see guards eating in the taverns and visiting people at the inn. Purdey’s Rest is a safe place for its people, and the guards will keep it that way by kicking troublemakers out of the stronghold. If you need to, remind the players that they’ll have lots of chances to fight things in the dungeon.

For more on players who feel tempted to attack townsfolk, see Two weird D&D questions no one asks anymore, answered by the City State of the Invincible Overlord.

Helping distressed players

If you see that a player is uncomfortable with your descriptions, change what you say so it doesn’t seem as real. A player will feel better about monsters and scary descriptions after they play for a while. One way to help with that is to give the player a chance to feel like a hero. During combat, describe how a successful hit by a character makes a monster stagger or fall back. This lets the player know they are in control, and that they don’t need to worry.

For a time my scary descriptions may have wrecked the fun, see My 5 Biggest Game Mastering Blunders Ever and What I Learned.

Running for empathetic players

When you run adventures as a GM, you might see that some players don’t like the idea of killing intelligent creatures, or monsters they feel sorry for. Some players might be upset if they feel as though the game is making them kill other creatures. So it’s important for you to remind the players that they always get to decide what their characters do. Instead of killing intelligent creatures like orcs, goblins, and kobolds, the characters can defeat them in combat, then threaten them into leaving.

The crates, barrels, and boxes of loot that the orcs and the goblins have collected are all stolen from merchants and travelers. It’s okay for the characters to take the stolen loot and sell it if that’s what they want to do. If any players are worried about taking things that were stolen, they can return the stolen goods to the guards in Purdey’s rest instead of selling them.

Arguments among players

Sometimes arguments are more serious. But you can still solve many serious arguments by talking to the players. If two of them want their characters to kill goblin bandits but the other players want to let the goblins go, ask all the players why they feel the way they do. The players who want to kill the goblins might just be worried that the sneaky goblins will come back and attack the party again. So ask for Wisdom (Insight) checks if you want the characters to know that the goblins are too scared to come back, and that the players don’t need to worry.

Sometimes you might have a different situation. Most of the players don’t want to kill the goblins because they feel sorry for them. But one player says they’re going to kill the goblins just to make the other players feel bad. You might have a player who ignores other players when they want to talk to monsters, and who always attacks instead. Or a player might say that since their character killed most of the monsters in an encounter, they deserve more treasure than anyone else. Fixing those kinds of arguments is harder. Because when a player tries to wreck the fun for other players on purpose, that’s a kind of bullying.

Just like with other arguments and problems in the game, you should try to fix bullying first by talking. Remind everyone that characters do best in the game when they work together. Tell the player that as the GM, you want everyone to have fun, and what they’re doing is hurting the fun for the other players. But sometimes a player who’s being a bully won’t stop. And if that happens, that’s the one time when you get to use your power as the GM to tell the player that their character can’t do what they want. You might even need to tell the player that if they don’t stop, they won’t be allowed to play in your game.

For more on player cooperation, see A Roleplaying Game Player’s Obligation.

Summarize the boring parts

When you decide things aren’t important, you can give the players a short summary instead. Traveling is often best summarized. If the characters leave the dungeon to rest up, then come back, you don’t need to play out having them move through every room like you did when they first explored. You can just tell them that the dungeon is dark and quiet as they go back to where they left off.

See Just Because a Dungeon Numbers Every Room Doesn’t Mean Players Have To Explore Room-by-Room and What Choose-Your-Adventure Books Can Teach Game Masters About Pacing and Decisions.

Peril in Pinebrook (2023) by Shawn Merwin

Peril in Pinebrook is a free, introductory adventure designed for new and young Dungeons & Dragons players and inspired by The Practically Complete Guide to Dragons. For a more accessible experience, it includes a simplified version of fifth edition’s rules and premade character sheets.

Let players succeed

Use “Yes, and …” or “No, but …” Allow the players to succeed as much as possible, and let them participate in the telling of the story. If they want to try something unexpected, try to say “yes” and then work their ideas into the story. If you have to say “no” to a player’s idea, suggest options that let them do something similar.

Allow Alternatives. D&D is a game of fantasy, where heroes use wits, skill, and determination to overcome obstacles. Sometimes those obstacles are defeated with weapons and spells. But characters can succeed in other ways. Communicating with monsters, tricking them or frightening them away, or avoiding a fight while cleverly sneaking past a challenge can be just as much fun. Such options are ideal if anyone playing the game wants to avoid violence.

The advice to let players succeed reminds DMs to allow player ingenuity rather than looking for whatever solution we have in mind, but still acknowledges that not every idea works. See Challenging Your Players’ Skill Without Risking Frustration and Sometimes I Tell Players No, but “Say Yes” Made Me a Better Dungeon Master.

Listening as a safety tool

Encourage your players to speak to you, publicly or privately, if something in the game upsets them. Then respond appropriately. For instance, you can move past upsetting topics by quickly narrating a resolution to a scene, then quickly move to the next part of the story.

Avoid character deaths

Peril in Pinebrook started a controversy by suggesting ways for DMs to avoid killing new player’s characters. “You can intervene if the characters seem to be losing the battle. For instance, you can give the characters advantage on attack rolls or give the monsters disadvantage on attack rolls.” The adventure also advises DMs to avoid focusing fire on a single PC. For more on sparing characters, see How To Adjust Combat Difficulty on the Fly Using the Magic of Roleplaying.

Before scorning the advice, consider that even Gary Gygax recommended occasional mercy for characters. In the original Dungeon Master’s Guide (p.110), he wrote, “Now and then a player will die through no fault of his own. He or she will have done everything correctly, taken every reasonable precaution, but still the freakish roll of the dice will kill the character. In the long run you should let such things pass as the players will kill more than one opponent with their own freakish rolls at some later time. Yet you do have the right to arbitrate the situation. You can rule that the player, instead of dying, is knocked unconscious, loses a limb, is blinded in one eye or invoke any reasonable severe penalty that still takes into account what the monster has done. It is very demoralizing to the players to lose a cared-for-player character when they have played well.”

The Latest D&D Studio Update on the 2024 Core Rule Books Should Have Excited Me, but It Just Made Me Apprehensive

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The latest D&D Studio update on the 2024 core rule books should have excited me, but it just made me apprehensive.

Fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons started as a game with a strong foundation, strong enough that when I imagined the changes that would best improve the game, I just wished for replacements for the annoying spells, overpowered feats, and toothless monsters—the game’s features atop the foundation.

So far, the playtest and design team’s reports excited me, because the preview showed that the team understood the pain points in the 2014 game and sought ways to relieve them. But now I’m concerned.

Until now, only one change struck me as a bad idea: The design team chose to strengthen 1st-level characters in the worst way. Instead of making new characters more durable by giving them a few extra hit points, the designers opted to make new characters more complicated by adding an extra feat.

To welcome new players, 1st-level characters need to become a bit more durable—just another 5 hp or so. This boost would spare them from starting as fragile as soap bubbles. D&D should not prove deadliest at 1st level. Sure, some of us love the challenge of 1st level, but to a new player who invested time creating a character often with a personality and backstory, a quick death just feels like a major loss. Such failures push players away from the game. We all know the problem. To avoid such disappointments, the D&D team seems to love the now worn trope of starting characters safely at a fair or carnival. I typically contrive a way for characters to gain the benefit of an aid spell as reward for a good deed.

At conventions and game stores, I’ve introduced hundreds of players to D&D and a key lesson stands out: Simpler characters work better. The 2014 design team made a winning choice when they kept new characters streamlined, but the 2024 redesign adds complexity by giving new characters another feat to choose and to play. For new players, the addition risks making the game feel overwhelming. Maybe that’s fine. New players confronted with a pre-generated character always find it overwhelming, but at the end of the session, they typically feel comfortable with the basics.

Surely, lead designer Jeremy Crawford can point to Unearthed Arcana surveys that show the sort of super-invested D&D players who spent an hour completing the playtest surveys love the extra feat, but that just proves players who mastered the game enjoy characters sweetened with more power. Candy isn’t always good for us or the game.

D&D fans already knew about the extra feat and I accept that not every aspect of D&D will suit me. However, another reveal from the studio update leads me to worry. Jeremy Crawford says, “We’re making sure that every major piece of class design does appear in Unearthed Arcana at least once, but there are going to be some brand new spells that people won’t see until the book is out. There are a bunch of monsters people won’t see until the books are out. There are magic items people won’t see until the books are out.”

Apparently the team feels that class features deserve the scrutiny of the D&D public, but spells don’t. Apparently the team failed to learn from the public playtest leading to the 2014 core books.

In D&D, if you play a spellcaster, your spell list forms the bulk of your abilities. So every wizard tends to prepare the same powerful spells on the list. Spells deserve the same scrutiny as class features. In 2016, when I looked at the most annoying spells in the D&D game, I learned that none of the problem spells appeared in the public playtest documents. Back then, the design team figured their in-house playtesting would suffice for these spells. That proved wrong. Thanks to the power of certain annoying spells, the spells weighed on just about every session with a character able to cast one.

Now the team seems to be falling victim to the same overconfidence. Perhaps the team would say they’ve learned from 10 years of experience and can better evaluate new game elements. Surely that’s true, but still they recently released twilight domain clerics and silvery barbs, so I see a some hubris behind touting all the new surprises in the new books.

I don’t want all new surprises. I want a game polished to perfection because it benefits from 10 years of play.

What Choose-Your-Adventure Books Can Teach Game Masters About Pacing and Decisions

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The play loop at the heart of a roleplaying game session focuses on decision making. The game master describes a situation. When the players face a decision they make a choice, and then the rules help determine an outcome and the game master describes that result. The situation changes, leading to a new decision. Repeat until everyone breaks for pizza.

In a role-playing game, scenes focus attention on the times when players fight a battle, talk to a non-player character, or or rush to escape the caverns beneath an erupting volcano. During scenes, players take moment-by-moment control of their characters. In combat, decisions come with each turn and the rules spell out the results. In roleplaying scenes, players speak for their characters and the game plays like a conversation. Scenes simplify the game’s core play loop so much that the game master can focus on running the players’ friends and foes.

Outside of scenes, game masters have a harder time knowing when to stop narrating and when to ask, “What do you want to do?” Every game master knows to pause to give the players chances to make decisions, but the challenge comes from finding the right moments to ask. If you ask players who lack a goal, they may just shrug. If you ask players with a goal who face no obstacles, then they only face a choice between carry on and quit. If you narrate past the moment characters want to act, then players become spectators. If you pause too often, then players feel mired in minutiae. But if you pick the perfect moments, the pacing in your game improves and players feel like they guide the action.

In a How to Use Scenes and Summaries to Focus on the Best Parts of a Role-Playing Adventure, I used the term summary for the game time out of scenes, dividing play into scenes and summary. That article helped game masters start successful scenes by looking for moments when the characters’ goal reaches an obstacle. A summary skips the uneventful parts of passing game time, speeding past the times when players travel a safe road, search a library, or collect a reward from a patron.

Buffalo Castle solo dungeon (1976) for Tunnels & Trolls

However, a lot of gameplay happens outside of scenes, and my categories of scene and summary fail to include most exploration. Scenes aside, the situation-decision loop most resembles choose-your-adventure books. Such books distill a roleplaying game’s core loop to a printed page. A passage describes a situation that readers imagine themselves in. At the end of the description, the text offers a menu of choices. The reader picks one and pages to the numbered passage that describes the outcome and sets the new scene. Solo adventures like the ones for Tunnels & Trolls follow the same format. Roleplaying games beat choose-you-adventure books by featuring a game master ready to allow surprising decisions and to run the supporting cast in scenes, but the pattern matches.

Choose-your-adventure books set a good example because they typically avoid the missteps that GMs make running the situation-decision loop in live games.

Choose-your-adventure books start characters with a goal. Characters need a goal or they have no reason to act. When D&D started, the game’s goal was to gather loot, but as the story and character started driving the game, players opted for higher goals. Nowadays, most players create characters with individual goals, often in collaboration with the group. See A Roleplaying Game Player’s Obligation.

To start an adventure, before you ever ask players for a decision, you typically hook them with a short-term goal for the whole party. The best hooks appeal to characters’ individual goals and often add an enigma to arouse players’ curiosity. When you don’t know the characters, create hooks that appeal to both paladins and rogues, to both do-gooders and treasure hunters. For more on hooks, see Whether You Call Them Rumors, Secrets, Clues, Hooks, or Leads, These Nuggets of Information Power Adventures and Campaigns.

Choose-your-adventure books offer choices that seem to lead toward the characters’ goal. Imagine trying to start an adventure by revealing that long ago a mighty warrior hid a magic sword in a long-forgotten location, and then asking the players what they want to do. The mere rumor would leave players with no clear choice of action, so the game stalls. Every adventure starts with a hook that (1) entices the characters to follow some goal and (2) reveals ways to reach that goal.

Even after you set the hook, future decision points should come when the players see options that might lead to success. Otherwise, players feel stuck. For more about options that lead to a goal, see How the Flawed Hooks in Descent Into Avernus Might Make D&D Players Feel Railroaded.

The Cave of Time (1979) choose your own adventure book

Choose-your-adventure books offer multiple options. The author of a choose-your-adventure book would never dare end a passage with one option, because the fun comes from choosing. But game masters never feel obligated to list the players’ options, so a lack of choices is less obvious. Nonetheless, if an adventure only ever gives one choice, players will notice the pattern. While dutifully following the one clear choice, they may feel railroaded.

As a game master, my favorite moments during a session come when I sit idle as the players’ debate the tough choices open to their characters. Each option balances hope with a price. All the options lead to consequences that will spin the game in a different direction. Watching these discussions, I know the game world has come alive. Players only occasionally face decisions so compelling, but a choice of one option becomes no choice at all. Asking for a decision just hides a shameful lack of options.

A D&D game can offer choices between two similar doors, and players will appreciate the option, but the best decisions come with enough information to make each selection different and promising.

Characters in a roleplaying game have freedom to attempt any action. Sometimes that latitude leaves players struggling to sift through options in search of a few promising choices. Too often, players may feel confused by their predicament in the game world. Either way, summarizing the situation and listing the most obvious choices cuts through the fog and brings focus.

If a decision leaves players struggling to choose an action, list the three most promising options, and then remind the group that they can also choose an option of their own. After all, unlike a book, you’re ready for anything.

For more on choices and information, see Dungeons Masters Can Make Fake Choices for Players, But Should You?. Also see How to improve your game by forcing characters into tough choices and The Best DM Tricks for Helping a Party Make Choices.

Choose-your-adventure books describe time passing until the character’s situation changes. Until the players face a decision, you can summarize any amount of game-world time in narration, from seconds to years. Don’t feel like you have to keep pausing to revisit decisions the players already made. Only pause when the situation changes.

If the players have already made the relevant choices, describe passing time until the situation changes, typically until players face obstacles. Pacing falters when DMs ask for a decision even when players just have a choice to keep going toward their goal or to give up. None of this means that players have to dutifully sit through narration that covers a month’s journey. Invite players to interrupt at any time. A good summary leaves players with a sense of passing events and with chances to pause and make decisions.

For example, dungeons tend to start with key choices over marching order, light, and strategy. Does the party plan to explore carefully or rush ahead to stop the midnight ritual? Will they listen at doors or check for traps? Does someone scout? Once these choices set a pattern and the dungeon starts to seem familiar, DMs can summarize the exploration until the situation changes. You can switch your pace between methodical exploration and summary many times during a session. In the areas with nothing new to discover and no threats to face, and no new decisions to make, take the shortcut of summarizing. Then when the players encounter something new, slow to a pace that lets them account for every action.

See Just Because a Dungeon Numbers Every Room Doesn’t Mean Players Have To Explore Room-by-Room.

Choose-your-adventure books end descriptions when readers feel eager to act. As a GM, you stop talking when (1) players have something to do or a decision to make and (2) the players understand enough to make a sensible decision. The barbarian needs to know about the lava-filled trench before making the choice to charge the dragon. All this may seem obvious, but it leads to some less obvious advice.

When you set a scene, the end of your narration should highlight something that dares the heroes to act. The best narration can skip the what-do-you-want-to-do question because they leave players eager to take action. Sometimes, that invitation to action comes from the monsters in the room. More often, some curious feature simply begs a closer look.

See End Your Descriptions With Something That Inspires Players To Act

Resist the temptation to start scenes late. The authors of choose-your-adventure books can succumb to the same weaknesses as game masters, I suspect we share a fault: As we narrate the start of a scene, things happen that make readers or players want to act. We talk about a changing situation, and then we keep talking. While choose-your-adventure readers can only grumble, players can stop the game.

If you run D&D for long enough, you’ll come to a situation where you must rewind game time because your enthusiasm for the villain’s big moment leads you to keep talking well after the players decide to act. Who can blame game masters? We planned for the bad guy’s monologue or culminating ritual and we want to follow it through before the players ruin it. Meanwhile, the players start throwing dice.

Sometimes even adventure boxed text suffers from the same authorial hubris. The author of a long, boxed passage becomes so eager to describe a scene develop that it becomes the tabletop equivalent to a cut scene. For a while, published adventures routinely offered boxed text that spanned columns. Sometimes the boxed text even narrated actions for the players. “As you step into the room…” In practice, no DM ever finished such readings before a player blurted, “I attack!” (In the authors’ defense, at times TSR published adventures written for an audience of readers rather than dungeon masters because no one could possibly play the avalanche of game content the company printed.)

The tempo of decisions sets the pace of the game. Gamers joke that in D&D, seconds of combat take hours to play out, while weeks of travel pass in seconds. Much of a difference in pace stems from how frequently players make decisions. Combat encounters and roleplaying scenes fill time with nonstop choices, but can still feel fast paced. During the game’s slower periods, the game master merely summarizes the passage of time with few choices. Either way, the amount of narration between choices affects pacing. By adding more descriptions, the game’s pace slows. This might give players a break from the intensity of a major battle.

Roleplaying game sessions typically alternate between fast-paced scenes where players face rapid decisions, and slower spans of time where players travel or explore while making fewer choices. This ebb and flow creates a pleasing contrast between intense action scenes, suspenseful periods of exploration and discovery, and easy breaks where characters recover and players plan.

D&D’s Biggest Controversies Ranked—1. D&D Becomes a Target of the Satanic Panic

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Content warning for discussion of murder, suicide, and mentions of child abuse.

Through the 1980s, Satan made regular headlines. Folks kept blaming the devil for luring kids to murder, suicide, and ritual sacrifice. Police dutifully investigated. The falsely accused sometimes went to prison only to be cleared years later. And the media trumpeted every lurid moment. Concerned parents found the devil’s work in heavy metal music, Dungeons & Dragons, and especially day care centers. The fervor became known as the Satanic Panic.

The panic started in 1980, but its power came from the culture of the seventies.

Throughout the seventies, the counterculture of the sixties lingered as a new age passion for astrology, crystals, and such. To some, things like tarot cards and witchcraft just seemed like a way to explore their spirituality in daring ways, but Christian fundamentalists saw the fad as an invitation to the devil.

In 1969, Charles Manson led his followers to perform a series of murders. The group staged the killings to appear ritualistic, leading the public to search for other murderous cults potentially inspired by the devil. The seventies had no more serial killers than other eras, but serial killers now got nationwide attention. The public learned how killers could seem like friends and neighbors, and how their bloody crimes might follow a ritual pattern. The Zodiac Killer even coined his nickname from astrology.

In the media, The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey reached bookstores in 1969 and went to sell over a million copies. In 1973 the The Exorcist set box office records. The movie claimed to be based on a true story.

Meanwhile, the number of women working outside the home surged. They put their children in day care, but they felt guilty about it and feared time outside the home might somehow damage their children.

To battle what seemed like a rise of a depraved and godless culture, conservative Christians like Jerry Falwell organized the religious right into a voting block and helped elect Ronald Reagan as president.

Together, these trends created the right culture for a panic. The furor started when a 1980 book titled Michelle Remembers became a bestseller. The book tells how its author, psychiatrist Dr. Larry Pazder, treated a housewife named Michelle Smith using a technique called “recovered-memory therapy.” Prazder claimed to have uncovered Smith’s repressed memories from when she was five years old. She claimed to remember being given to a satanic cult and enduring 14 months of captivity and torture, while seeing ritual murders and mutilations, often involving babies. Today, recovered memory therapy is discredited as pseudoscience, but then many accepted Smith’s stories as fact. Pazder and Smith established themselves as authorities in “Satanic Ritual Abuse,” and they became resources for psychologists and law enforcement authorities. They made television appearances on shows like Oprah.

An anxious public came alert to the threat of satanic cults hiding next door, and they started seeing the devil’s influence everywhere.

In 1983, a California mother named Judy Johnson accused staff at her son’s preschool of abusing him. Questioned by investigators, her accusations grew to include sexual encounters with animals and a story of one teacher flying through the air. Prosecutors found no evidence, but the investigation expanded to interviewing several hundred children who had attended to school. Interviewers used suggestive techniques that invited children to pretend or speculate on supposed events. Children told of sexual abuse, and also of flying witches, hot air balloon trips, animal sacrifices, and a goat man. During the interviews, one child identified Chuck Norris from a photo as one of the abusers. Based on media reports, the day care seemed like a front for a satanic cult. The investigation lasted until 1987, and trials until 1990, when all charges were dropped without convictions. After a 12-day psychiatric examination during the affair, Judy Johnson was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.

Original Proctor & Gamble logo

News media and talk shows made the scandal into a national spectacle. Across the country, people found clues that seemed to reveal satanic cults hiding everywhere. Rumors spread that the consumer goods corporation Proctor & Gamble supported Satan. The evidence came from the company’s man-in-the moon logo from 1882. Part of the man’s beard resembled a reversed number 666 and the image included thirteen stars, a reference to the thirteen original U.S. colonies. Law enforcement officers trained to spot cult activities and traded information about satanic calendars, symbols, and supposed organizations. Authorities spent millions investigating hundreds of accusations of satanic abuse, especially in day care centers. They put suspects in jail and ruined lives and families. Eventually though, the cases proved baseless.

While this panic raged, D&D featured devilish-looking creatures and idols on the covers of its rule books. Inside, concerned parents found descriptions of demons, devils, and spells that could summon them. In 1979, the public learned about the game from reports that painted the game as “bizarre” and its players as “cultish.” During the Satanic Panic, D&D became a lightning rod.

D&D co-creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson both identified as Christians. Gary’s devotion even led him to refuse to celebrate Christmas, in part because of the holiday’s pagan roots. But Gygax recognized D&D as make believe and happily added elements from real Christian religion to the game. That included holy men who could walk on water and turn sticks into snakes. He added demons named in Christian sources. If demons and devils served as foes to kill, Gygax saw them as fair game for pretending.

However, fundamentalists saw the game differently. In 1980, Utah parents demanded that Wasatch High School ban its D&D club because the game’s lack of holy reverence for biblical miracles like water walking and resurrection. Christian Life Ministries examined D&D and reported on the dangers they perceived. “If it’s only a game, why do they use hundreds of traditional Christian terms? And why do they use them in such blatantly blasphemous ways?? Why??” Across the country, parents fought to rid D&D from their schools.

In 1982, teenager Irving “Bink” Pulling II committed suicide. The Washington Post reported that the boy had trouble fitting in. A classmate said, “He had a lot of problems anyway that weren’t associated with the game.” On his death, his mother Patricia Pulling learned for the first time that Irving had been playing D&D for the last two years. She blamed the strange game for her son’s death and started a crusade against D&D. She founded the group BADD, short for Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons. She sued her son’s high school principal for negligently allowing D&D play at the school. She sued D&D publisher TSR and accused the company of brainwashing kids and leading them to the occult. “If kids can believe in a god they can’t see then it’s very easy for them to believe in occult deities they can’t see.”

Televangelists like Pat Robertson, whose Christian Broadcasting Network reached millions, connected the game to “news reports of murders, suicides, fantasy mental changes. Young people are going totally crazy as a result of this game.” Evangelist Jack Chick published Dark Dungeons (1984), a comic that aimed to show readers how D&D led to Satan.

Many parents saw the alarm about devil worship as silly, but they still worried that the game blurred reality and fantasy in unhealthy ways, potentially causing psychological damage. The news offered plenty of stories to support that fear. For a while in the eighties, anytime a young victim of suicide happened to play D&D, the media reported on the D&D angle. A youth convicted in a murder case even tried to use D&D as part of his defense, claiming the game accustomed him to violence and led him away from God. Whenever tragedy struck the lives of young people who happened to play D&D, parents looked for something to blame, and the strange new game they didn’t understand seemed like an obvious culprit.

In 1985 more than 22 million people watched a segment linking Dungeons & Dragons to suicide and murder on the prime-time news show 60 Minutes. The report interviewed Pat Pulling and her tearful daughter. Gygax defended his game, but he stood little chance against the emotional appeal. On 60 Minutes, part of the entertainment comes from showing apparently guilty culprits squirm under the camera. Gygax tried to explain that D&D’s surging popularity meant that millions of kids played the game and, separately, some of those kids happened to be involved in tragedy. He aptly called criticism of D&D a witch hunt. The segment steered away from the devil-worship angle and toward the notion that the game damaged young minds. Still, psychiatrist Thomas Radecki talked about parents who saw their son “summon a Dungeons & Dragons demon into his room before he killed himself.”

To defend D&D from claims that the game threatened emotional harm, TSR hired psychologist and TV personality Dr. Joyce Brothers. TSR avoided ever showing gameplay that blurred reality with fantasy, so Gen Con banned any “live action events.”

To defend D&D from claims that the game lured kids to the occult, TSR removed the devilish idols and efreet from the covers of the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide in favor of more wholesome pictures in 1983. Then they renamed Deities & Demigods to Legends & Lore. The game’s second edition removed the words “devil” and “demon” and replaced them with the purely make-believe terms “tanar’ri” and “baatezu.”

Today, most parents’ opinion of D&D completely reverses the fears of the eighties. Parents see the game as a creative activity that teaches teamwork, encourages reading, practices arithmetic, fosters social skills, and creates real-world friendships. Today’s parents fear that children spend too much time glued to screens, so best of all, D&D games encourage kids to spend time with friends together at the kitchen table.

Go back to number 10.

D&D’s Biggest Controversies Ranked—2. Child Genius Disappears, Creating the Media Furor That Introduced D&D to America

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On August 15, 1979, a 16-year-old college student and computer nerd named James Dallas Egbert III disappeared from Michigan State University. His parents hired private detective William Dear to find their missing boy.

Dallas Egbert played D&D, a game that seemed strange enough to becomes Dear’s key lead. The detective focused his hunt on the notion that Egbert had played Dungeons & Dragons in the eight miles of steam tunnels under the university and remained lost, hidden, or trapped. Dear wondered if D&D had broken the “fragile barrier between fantasy and reality.” Perhaps D&D left Egbert so deluded that he believed he was a wizard exploring the dungeon. Perhaps his attempt to make the game real had left him hurt or even dead in the tunnels. “Dallas might actually have begun to live the game, not just to play it.”

Egbert’s disappearance introduced Dungeons & Dragons to America. The reports painted the game as “bizarre” and its players as a “cult.” A story in The New York Times speculated that Egbert became lost “while playing an elaborate version of a bizarre intellectual game called Dungeons & Dragons.”

“Students at Michigan State University and elsewhere reportedly have greatly elaborated on the game, donning medieval costumes and using outdoor settings to stage the content.”

On September 9, The San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner published an article titled, “Fantasy cult angle probed in search for computer whiz.”

“Police hunting for a missing 16-year-old computer whiz, yesterday completed a futile search of tunnels beneath the Michigan State University campus where fantasy lovers acted out roles in a bizarre game.”

Reporters consistently painted D&D as a “bizarre” game enjoyed by “secretive” and “cultish” players. Under the story lies the notion that D&D pulls players so deeply into fantasy that they lose touch with reality—that the game lures players to play out the fantasy in real life.

On September 13, less than a month after the disappearance, Egbert called and revealed his location. The teen’s attempt to flee depression had led him on a trek that took him to the home of an older male “admirer,” to Chicago, and then to Morgan City, Louisiana. During his trek, he survived two suicide attempts.

Egbert had turned to D&D for respite from his other troubles. He faced intense academic pressure from parents who had pushed him to skip two grades. He was gay at a time when few people accepted or tolerated the trait. (Later, he would beg Dear to keep this secret hidden.) In the book Perfect Victims, journalist Bill James writes, “Egbert was living among older kids who had nothing in common with him and who didn’t particularly like him. He was regarded as an irritating little twerp. He was 16, but looked 12. He got involved in numerous campus activities and groups, each of which devised a new kind of rejection for him.”

In a press conference, Dear said the teenager’s disappearance was not related to Dungeons & Dragons. But the detective still saw D&D as a bad influence. “You’re leaving the world of reality into the world of fantasy,” Dear said. “This isn’t a healthy game.”

The story of James Dallas Egbert ends sadly. In 1980, he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Perhaps if he had lived just a little longer, his tale could have led to a happier ending. The intelligence that isolated him could have become an asset. The secret that tormented him became more accepted. Perhaps, in more time, D&D could have helped him find his people.

For the full story, see The Media Furor that Introduced the “Bizarre Intellectual Game” of Dungeons & Dragons to America.

Next: Number 1.

D&D’s Biggest Controversies Ranked—3. Wizards of the Coast Attempts To Revoke the Current Open Gaming License

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In 1997 Wizards of the Coast bought Dungeons & Dragons publisher TSR, rescuing the company from bankruptcy. New D&D head Ryan Dancey looked for ways to turn the game into a healthy business. Dancey saw fan contributions as an enhancement to the D&D community that strengthened the game’s place in the market. Support from fans and from third-party publishers encouraged more people to play D&D. Dancey wrote, “This is a feedback cycle—the more effective the support is, the more people play D&D. The more people play D&D, the more effective the support is.” Besides, the numbers showed that the D&D business made money selling core books. Why not let fans and other companies bear the weight of supporting the game with low-profit adventures, settings, and other add-ons?

Dancey’s thinking led to the introduction of the Open Gaming License and the d20 License. Using these licenses gamers and gaming companies could create and distribute products compatible with the D&D rules. Sometimes the products competed with Wizard’s own publications, but the overall contributions from the community helped the game flourish. Other role-playing game companies recognized the success of this strategy and introduced similar licenses for their games.

The OGL granted a perpetual license, encouraging game publishers to view the OGL as a safe agreement to base investments on. “When v1.0a was published and authorized, Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast did so knowing that they were entering into a perpetual licensing regime,” Dancey said. However, the OGL does not grant an irrevocable license, and to lawyers, perpetual licenses can sometimes be revoked.

In 2022, Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks and Wizards of the Coast CEO Cynthia Williams appeared in a presentation for investors. Williams touted D&D’s popularity but described the game “under monetized.” Wizards aimed to do a better job of gaining income from the game, bringing more earnings to stockholders.

With monetization in mind, Wizards executives probably looked at other publishers profiting from D&D-compatible products and felt D&D’s owner deserved a cut. Royalties on a million-dollar Kickstarter for a D&D-compatible product would hardly move the bottom line of a company the size of Hasbro, but multiply that cut by 10 or more multi-dollar dollar kickstarters per year, every year, and the payoff adds up. So, the company asked lawyers to find a way break the OGL, and the legal team found a potential out in the word “authorized.”

The OGL states, “You may use any authorized version of this License.” What if Wizards simply declared current version of the license “unauthorized,” and then replaced the OGL with a new version containing terms that favored the company? Wizards prepared a FAQ that explained, “OGL 1.0a only allows creators to use ‘authorized’ versions of the OGL which allows Wizards to determine which of its prior versions to continue to allow use of when we exercise our right to update the license. As part of rolling out OGL 2.0, we are deauthorizing OGL 1.0a from future use and deleting it from our website. This means OGL 1.0a can no longer be used to develop content for release.”

The new OGL license required publishers to register their products, demanded royaties from larger publishers, and enabled Wizards to revoke the new agreement. Wizards surely knew such a move would meet resistance from the D&D community, but they made some allowances to minimize criticism.

The new OGL introduced some high-minded changes such as rules that prohibited material that is “blatantly racist, sexist, homophobic, trans-phobic, bigoted or otherwise discriminatory.” Wizards undoubtedly supported such additions, but they also gave the company a way to claim that the new agreement came from noble goals. In a FAQ, Wizards states, “OGL wasn’t intended to fund major competitors and it wasn’t intended to allow people to make D&D apps, videos, or anything other than printed (or printable) materials for use while gaming. We are updating the OGL in part to make that very clear.”
The new OGL only demanded royalties from the few companies who grossed more than $750,000 on D&D-comparable products. Wizards probably hoped that this would leave the vast number of D&D creators with no cause for complaint. That proved a miscalculation, perhaps because most D&D creators eyeing a million-dollar Kickstarter think, someday that could be my project.
The high-royalty rates in the new OGL only represented an opening offer in a negotiation. In late 2022 Wizards gathered about 20 third-party creators to outline the new OGL and to offer 15% royalty rate rather than 25% to publishers willing to sign a separate agreement. For growing companies, the OGL promised, “If You appear to have achieved great success…from producing OGL: Commercial content, We may reach out to You for a more custom (and mutually beneficial) licensing arrangement.”

Likely Wizards executives hoped big publishers would come to terms before the new OGL became public, smaller publisher and fans would consider themselves unaffected by the OGL, and any lingering objections would be forgotten. They miscalculated. A draft of the new OGL leaked, igniting a firestorm of criticism.

For eight days, Wizard’s avoided commenting on the leak. According to insiders, the company’s managers saw fans as overreacting and calculated that in a few months everyone would forget the uproar. The company drafted a FAQ they hoped would soothe fans and help speed acceptance.

Meanwhile, many of the biggest OGL publishers announced plans to drop the OGL or to introduce their own gaming licenses for their product. A fan-led campaign to send a clear message to Wizards by canceling D&D Beyond subscriptions went viral. So many gamers went to the site to stop payments that the traffic temporary shutdown the page. The story reached mainstream news.

Wizards of the Coast got the message. They scrambled to make accommodations, first by promising to remove the most onerous provisions from the new license, and then by committing to keep the existing OGL. Ultimately, Wizards put the Systems Reference Document for D&D 5.1 into the Creative Commons using a perpetual, irrevocable open license agreement outside the company’s control.

Next: Number 2.

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Core mechanics

Degrees of success

No missed attacks

Swingy d20s

Advantage and disadvantage.

Initiative

Combat escalation

Resolution transparency

Ability scores

Death

Durable first level characters

Share this:

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Roleplaying monsters

B10 Night’s Dark Terror (1986) by Jim Bambra, Graeme Morris and Phil Gallagher

Fudging rolls

B11 King’s Festival (1989) by Carl Sargent

Description and the senses

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Winging it

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Story beats

Building tension

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Sock puppets

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Call to adventure

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Helping indecisive players

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Don’t let rules questions stall the game

Share the narrative

Read the table

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Name tents

Going off script

An old school approach to failure

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Dealing with murderous treasure hunters

Helping distressed players

Running for empathetic players

Arguments among players

Summarize the boring parts

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Let players succeed

Listening as a safety tool

Avoid character deaths

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