Surface Level

On the shelf beside me sits a variety of books detailing wizard spells. From my humble 1984 copy of "The Complete Wizard's Handbook" to my special edition "Dungeon Crawl Classics", they are all packed full of spell lists and detailed descriptions of the magical effects. They are absolutely wonderful. I think it's time to do away with them. Modern D&D has, over the years, tried to undo the power curve of wizard. There is no quadratic wizard in 5e (in part because they are less powerful and fighters are more powerful). Now wizards get cantrips and their most powerful spell (wish) comes with a host of restrictions. Wish being restricted so much is pretty egregious, but I digress; wizards are now "balanced". Zzarchov Kowolski does a great job of summarizing the origin of this imbalance, in his blog post Everything you think about Game Mastering is probably wrong: Part VI Assumptions about game play , Kowolski points out that we've only assumed ...

I do not like cold starts. Opening in a tavern or what else kills the believability for me. It also lacks any hook for why the party should be working together instead of apart. To alleviate this I exclusively have some sort of starting condition. Most recently a caravan of refugees traveling across expansive, empty steppes. This is better than starting out nowhere but I still think there should be some glue to bind the party before they set out on adventure. To accomplish this, I've devised a method of quickly "linking" characters together, and then actually putting that to good use by making the players actually think. So here is my session zero character linking rules: Every character will roll a die. Which die is dependent on how many players you have and what the starting conditions are. A a larger die (such as a d10) will result in less relationships, while a smaller die (such as a d4) will result in many more relationships. A d8 tends to work well. In small groups,...