Hey welcome to the Dragons and Dungeons Blog!


I could go on about my background as a gamer blah blah we've all heard the stories.

So I'll tell you this....this blog's purpose is to detail the changes I am making to the DnD game to make it the game I want to play, and hopefully make it an even more fun game for others.

My version of the game will have a more realistic feel to it. That's not to say it will attempt to simulate every situation as accurately as possible. There simply won't be situations that are implausible or ridiculous because of bad game mechanics.

 For example, in Dragons and Dungeons you won't have fighters who can easily beat 1000 orcs in a fight on their own. One of my favorite characters, Aeric the Paladin, is 18th level and could probably do that under the 3.5 rules. He could probably do it even without his magic items.

Indeed, with these rules changes even a single orc could kill an 18th level paladin, while a 1st level fighter could actually have a chance to kill an ancient dragon! Not likely, but it could happen.

It has become a staple of RPG games for characters to level up, "earn" magic items, become more powerful, fight more powerful monsters and so on. I feel such a system hurts the player and the character. Eventually the character becomes unplayable, because he becomes too powerful. I've seen characters who have the equivalent power of a small nuke. It becomes silly to have such a character walk into a town and be asked to save it from say, a marauding troll, while at the same time, any adventure that will challenge the character will be something on the level of saving the world...over and over again.

I once wanted to run a prison break story for the characters, but I didn't want to just announce to them that they had been captured, all their magic items were gone, and they were sitting in a cell. At the same time, in order to capture them, I'd have had to "violate" laws and rules of RPGing. The players themselves would have revolted if I just took their items away, and this is a bad side product of the DnD mindset. The story, and the challenge of the adventure became secondary to the desire to have a powerful character with lots of magic items.

Such characters become harder to challenge, and the game becomes boring as a result.

Instead, the point of Dragons and Dungeons will be to promote a game where a character can be played for years, will be able to be challenged over and over, and who can participate in all manner of stories.