Swords and Storytellers

I have been in search of the perfect set of rules for surviving and traveling in the wilderness for 5th edition since I started running the Out of the Abyss campaign late last year. I’ve scoured the internet reading every DM’s home-brew ruleset. I’ve tried many different iterations of my own home-brew rules, and I’ve finally created something I am excited to share… but before I do, lets talk about why you would want a custom system for surviving in the wilderness?

Play the Fiction I believe that every game, RPG or not, mainly needs to do two things well…

1. Present the players with difficult choices.
2. Integrate the theme with the mechanics.

I’ll go into point 1 a little bit more in the next post, but here I want to talk about the importance of the overlap of theme and mechanics in Dungeons and Dragons.

D&D 5e has many systems and subsystems for adjudicating combat. Most of the rules text in D&D is dedicated to supporting the combat subsystem of the game. This gives you a goo…

D&D 5e leaves you a lot of latitude in how you run the game. D&D defines some rules, and leaves the rulings up to you as the DM. This gives the game the flexibility it needs to be useful to all groups of players, but sometimes advice on how to actual adjudicate these rules is harder to come by. In this 'series' I'm going to talk about how I run D&D and why I do it that way.
Skills and Proficiencies People played D&D without skills for 20 years, and they all had a good time. I think skills are fine overall, but sometimes they cause weird things to happen in the game. Consider the following scenario…

Player A: “I’d like to investigate the desk to look for clues”
Dungeon Master: “Roll and investigation check”
Player A (Who has taken the investigation proficiency, and invested their character build into the Int stat so they can be like Sherlock Holmes): “Oh crap, I rolled a 1. 6 total I guess”
Dungeon Master: “You don’t find anything”
Player B, C, D & E: “WE ALL…