The Pink Dice Chronicles

When I resurrected my gaming hobby several years ago, I did it as a father bringing his 4 daughters and wife into the hobby. For me, this was a really cool experience and I wanted to share it so I started this blog, the Pink Dice Chronicles. Now, years have passed, daughters have grown up and moved out and it is me and friends just playing now. Along the way though, I found that I wanted to help more people in the hobby, so I started a twitter account, and the PinkDiceGM twitter handle was born. On twitter, I accidentally started an unexpected gender experiment. I left off anything to indicate my gender, not on purpose. With a name like PinkDiceGM, I must be a woman, right?   So the experiment began without me even noticing it. Now I've been around the internet (been online since '92) and I know there are always jerks and trolls. Twitter is no exception. When I ran into jerks here and there, I did what I have learned to do. Engage politely, and then block if needed. I had t

Tomb of Horrors has always been a favorite of mine to run as a session or two for fun. When Tales of the Yawning Portal popped up with a 5th edition version, I had to get it and run it. Luckily my group was totally on board for a different experience for a few sessions, so away we go. I've run ToH in multiple systems and I have seen the ins and outs. I know all the tricks. I know what fun looks like and what frustration looks like. ToH is a great experience dating all the way back to Gary Gygax's original group. Let's take a look. My game was run with 5 players, although we swapped out a couple of players along the way. It lasted about 3 sessions of about 4 hours each. All of the players started with multiple 14th level characters, so they could switch to new ones as characters died. My party ran no rogues, which was just weird. This is all my opinion. Your game may go differently, your gaming group may have different problems and successes. I'm not going to argue

For years I have been planning an Asian-inspired campaign, in fact, since before D&D 5E even came out. Originally it was to be a Pathfinder campaign. Instead, something better came together out of a combination of 5E, some homebrew, and the Forgotten Realms Kara-Tur setting. The campaign concept evolved over a period of years to become a group of monster hunters in Asian-inspired Kara-Tur somehow getting caught up in the Blood War, the eternal war between demons and devils. I knew to do this right it was going to take a lot of homebrew and a lot of prep. In the end, there are 3 custom races, 7 custom classes / archetypes, a whole new weapon set, and several house rules. Prep involves coming up with lots of place names and character names in a setting I am not particular well-versed in, either specifically or by genre. To save myself a lot of work, both of my Roll20 groups play different parties in the exact same campaign.  Prep once, play twice. Half the prep is a wonderful thing

I've GMed over 100 sessions of Dungeons and Dragons 5E now, with over 40 different players across multiple campaigns. I think I have finally learned enough to make a meaningful commentary on the system. I really love it, except for one thing: my bad guys, NPCs, and monsters are always getting ran over by the PCs as they sprint through encounters. They don't even think about it anymore. Bing, bang, bam -- they run in and kill the baddies. I had a level 15 take out a level 21 lich in a round and a half without breaking a sweat. My new campaign has been years in the making and I really wanted to get a different feel from combat and NPC interaction. The party is a group of monster hunters in Kara-Tur, the Asian-inspired part of Forgotten Realms.  To slow down the action, I really have emphasized two major changes: making NPC interactions trickier and making monster interaction trickier. For NPCs, the PCs now have to navigate the subtleties of honor and tradition. Each PC has 7