To the personal site of Jeff Werner
And probably some other stuff as well
How many of you have had your hard-boiled games descend into silliness in a matter of sessions? Have you have ever begun a campaign that aimed for Game of Thrones only to have it land closer to Monty Python? I know I have! Why do so many games follow this predictable trajectory? There are probably […]
In this post I’ll be discussing a group of monstrous humanoids that seem to comprise a taxon of some sort: the goblinoids. The goblinoids consist of the following members: goblins (obviously), hobgoblins, and bugbears. I’ll be considering the likely relationship between these creatures and what sorts of selective pressures might have produced the mixture of […]
Building trust with your players is one of the most important aspects of GMing, and many of the best moments in RPGs are only possible when there is trust between everyone at the table. On the other hand, the quality of play can be negatively impacted by a lack of trust or the existence of […]
A properly paced game is a thing of beauty. Intimate interpersonal scenes have appropriate emotional weight and action scenes are exiting and punchy. Unfortunately, we’ve all run or played in games that feel like they’re dragging for reasons that may be unclear. In a previous post I point-out some sources of slow down and provide […]
I want to give a few thoughts about pacing that have occurred to me over the course of my GM career. Pacing is not an exact science, which can make getting it right difficult. It might not even be immediately clear that there is an issue that can be improved upon. Nevertheless, pacing is one […]
In this post I want to cover half-elves and half-orcs, because I think they showcase an important question in biology. Namely, “what is a species?”. The existence of both races implies that successful interbreeding between humans and orcs and humans and elves is possible. What is less clear is whether half-orcs and half-elves are themselves […]
In an earlier post I described what I think is a plausible scenario for the evolution of bipedalism in the dragonborn lineage. In that post I argued the locomotor similarities between dragonborn and humans is likely a results of a process called convergent evolution. To briefly reiterate, convergent evolution produces similar structures and adaptations to […]
The D&D race that I’ll be covering in this post is the dragonborn. These bizarre humanoids are a blending of reptile and human traits. Among other things, they are covered in scales instead of skin or hair, they have large jaws full of sharp conical teeth, and clawed hands and feet. Alternately, they are cultural […]
I’ve written a few posts on elves to-date, but a subject I haven’t yet touched is their strangely long life-spans. While the average human might expect to live around 80 years, elves can live to be nearly 1000 years old with little deterioration to their physical or mental states. A perfectly valid question in both […]
In this post I will be returning to the topic of elves. I noted in my first post that they are freakin’ weird – a statement that I stand by. One feature that makes them freakin’ weird is their lack of a need for sleep. D&D lore states that elves don’t sleep, per se, but […]