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'At the Table' Category

Respecting Time

Tuesday, June 8th, 2021

 

GMs, particularly for long-term campaigns, usually put a lot of time and effort into prep-work for their games. Players, particularly players who have never tried to run a long-term campaign, often lack this perspective, treating the weekly game as a casual, drop-in event, able to be canceled at the last minute without it being rude. “Just a game.” Right?

This is a problematic perception. It disrespects the GM’s time and effort, and it disrespects the time set-aside by the other players at the table.

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Goblin Babies and Wasp Nests: Too Close to Home?

Friday, September 25th, 2020

 

Dungeons & Dragons is getting rid of inherently evil humanoids, maybe even race-based ability scores, and so on. I’ve personally always disliked alignment for various reasons, the old “slaughtering goblin babies” problem being one of those, and I also don’t put humanoid women-and-children in the path of adventurers, so the problem hasn’t come up in my games.

But I do want a way to have “these are probably not things you want around” to be a thing with monster-types because…well…such things do exist in the real world, even if they aren’t rampaging barbaric hordes wielding steel and magic. I like monsters for heroes to overcome.

For example, in the real world, we Raid-bomb wasp hives that are built on our houses, and you would probably stomp a nest of black widow spider eggs into goo if you found one, and cockroaches that have set up shop in our walls are going to a roach motel. And we feel–and probably are–justified in doing so. But there’s a lot to explore and unpack here.

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