William Brandes Stoddard

A Ninth Year of Blogging

 Goodness, it has been another year. This year I started a Patreon, and for a small-time gaming blog, it does in...

What Kinds of Content Do You Want?

I'm interested in making your experience of being my patron as interesting and fun as possible. I'm posting content as often as I can, which is less often than I'd like - it would be great to get b...

Compelled Duel Issues

 A couple of months ago, cherished reader Jonathan McGee asked me for my thoughts on the 1st-level spell compelled duel. At the time, my answer could be summed up as, “I’m not sur...

Difficulty in Tabletop Games

In a recent blog post, Sly Flourish talks about 1st level as the high-water mark for danger in 5e....

LARP Design: Wandering Monsters and Active Locations

In a boffer LARP campaign, it does a lot of good for the wandering-monster gameplay experience if the players have a steady supply of reasons to move around the game site in small groups. That is, ...

D&D 5e: Earth Domain

Of all the domains that have seen official support in 5e, there are a few ongoing, surprising gaps compared to the 3.5 list of domains and, for that matter, 4e builds. In this case – as if the ti...

D&D 5e: Four Spells from Fourth Edition

In last year’s 4e megathread, I listed a bunch of awesome spell names and concepts that hadn...

Level Up Your Background, Part Three

This is the conclusion of my series on advancing your background. If you've forgotten what the heck is going on here, go back to Part One.

2019-08-24 04:23:49 +0000 UTC View Post

Five Magic Items of Sorcerer's Blood

I’ve been listening to a lot of the Court of Swords podcast lately, so I assume that its recent blood-transfusion stories have ...

LARP Design: Faction Goals

This post is, in short, absolutely not what I should be working on right now, but I have to get it out of my head and onto your screen before I can make myself work on anything else, so he...

Level Up Your Background, Part Two

This is a continuation of the last post. I'm working through more of the Player's Handbook Backgrounds and of...

Level Up Your Background

I’m a bigtime fan of 5e’s introduction of Backgrounds, particularly as a source of skill and tool proficiencies and noncombat features. Even more than (most) classes and subclasses, Backgrounds...

Worldbuilding with Charm Person

A few days ago in Twitter, and in a friend’s Discord channel, I posed some questions about how a setting might respond to the existence of charm person and, implicitly, higher-grade mind...

Ki Unleashed

I've released a new PDF of monk subclasses for 5e, through Tribality Publishing. It's available to you for free as Patreon backers. If you've already bought it through DTRPG, I hope you don't mind ...

LARP Design: Effects on Buildings

This is the story of how, a couple of weeks ago, I had an idea eight years too late for the problem it solves. There's a lot of development history to go into this, though, so bear with me and I'll...

New Invocations for the Pact of the Chain

I don’t know if this is going to be one of my Unpopular Opinions, but I think it’s easy to look at the warlock Pacts (not Patrons, just Pacts) and expect them to deliver more than the designers...

Four New Spells for Seafaring

As part of the Seas of Vodari project, I’m creating new spells for nautical adventures. Thinking back to 3.x, I recall a lot of highly-specialized spells that were okay for wizards, but so situat...