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It’s old news know, but when 4e was released gnomes and half-orcs were cut from the first PHB! The exclusion of a race predicated on assault or really unusual romance was one thing, but why gnomes?

The Gnome Question

So what exactly are gnomes? Well, they’re a race of short happy folk. No wait, that’s halflings. They’re a race of subterranean humanoids. No, that’s dwarves. They’re a fey race known for its innate magic. No, that’s eladrin / elves.

Gnomes don’t have an easy one-line identity.

A Look Back

Gnomes didn’t make the cut into some of the original D&D products either, back when dwarves and elves were a mixture of classes and races (you could be a fighter, or a magic user, or an elf…).

In 1e gnomes had very similar racial abilities to dwarves, only they lacked

Even people only tangentially aware of D&D know of Lawful Good paladins or the infamous chaotic neutral barbarians. Alignment is both a blessing to role-playing and a bane, offering variety but being not entirely flexible.

History Lesson

Alignment brings with it horror stories: the player that uses a chaotic alignment to justify their own unruly or disruptive behaviour, or the person who hides behind a lawful alignment so they can be a ****. To many, alignment becomes more of a shackle than a tool, especially those who subscribed to the alignment change mechanics of earlier editions which essentially penalised the player for character growth and change.

Then there was neutrality. It was fractionally different from the other alignments it was often dismissed, or used as a way to play

So, you just killed a PC. The table has fallen quiet and the player is currently working through the seven stages of death. Some makes a lame joke to lighten the mood and it falls flat (“He’s dead, Jim,” or “if you strike me down, I shall become more power than… GHAAA! Didn’t buy it did you?”)

Then the thought hits you: now what?

The first thing to do after a character dies is to ask the player if they want to roll-up a new character.  You might *easily* be able to avoid the whole thorny issue. With 9+ new classes being released every year there’s almost always something new to play or bring to the table.

A quick math aside here: There are an average of 10 encounters per level for 300 encounters between L1 and L30, so with 3 encounters a night and one game a week

The lack of an "avoidance mechanism" is one of my largest gripes with 4th Edition

The game is very action-based, with limited mechanics for reaction and response. Most of the time this has a positive benefit to the game: players choose to take an action, to use a power, or spend a resource. Even the few reactionary powers have a built-in choice. You don't have to make an Opportunity Attack, you choose to and choose when to, and halflings choose when to use second chance.

Likewise, 4e has taken great strives to remove all "save or die" effects. Petrification or death tends to be the result of multiple failed saving throws and PCs typically have multiple rounds to bleed to death, with very few monsters having the ability to reduce a character to negative bloodied. The developers worked

One of the mantras flooding the WotC message boards is the necessity of the “Power Creep”, the gradual increase of player and monster power as required to sell more books.

The argument goes like this: if books do not increase the overall power of characters they will not sell.

I cannot argue that books that offer clearly more potent options will sell, but I disagree that you must increase power level and especially not for every book.

I should start but arguing that power correction is different from power creep. Not every class and option is going to be as viable as other classes, builds, or variants. A book like Arcane Power, which sets out to correct a disparity between the wizard and other controllers is not an example of a power creep but a correction. A patching of the

Very few of my campaigns have been entirely serious. While my current campaign is fairly straight in-world, the players themselves often descend into fits of laughter, jokes, and Monty Python quotation.

But most of my early campaigns in High School were seldom as serious. The world itself was a strange and comedic place with the High King Bob and his enchanted tankard of ale that could kill a man with a single blow. The various mishmash of houserules and semi-serious tables and netbooks added much intention and unintentional comedy to my games.

The most infamous was an infamous netbook of, er, carnal activities which provided a wealth of bizarre information including STDs. (which came-up more than once. Curse those orc prostitutes!)

The above netbook's most infamous addition was the

There's nothing like a good ol' dungeon crawl. Except each and every other dungeon crawl.

As long as there have been PCs kickin' in doors there have been semi-linear dungeons for them to jaunt through. My first adventure was a dungeon crawl. And, now that I think of it, my first twenty adventures were essentially dungeon crawls.

Sometimes a nice old-fashioned dungeon crawl works. They're a simple microcosm of a story with rooms being scenes and doors being choices. If you take your story-outline and make that a physical map you've just designed a dungeon.

But most of the time now, I like my dungeons to have a twist: a unique quirk beyond just the usual underground semi-natural tunnels.

For a Forgotten Realms campaign I had the “dungeon” be three overlapping layers of the city, with

I've been a Dungeon Master for almost as long as I've been playing. I played twice before I broke-out my DM screen and have probably clocked three times as many hours as monsters than I have as a PC. But I started a good eight years before Robin published his laws, so I made a few mistakes (read: a few horrible, unforgivable, ninth-circle worthy betrayals of mistakes).

The biggest mistake has always been related to sticking to my plots. As a writer-at-heart (like 95% of all DMs) I have a story I want to tell, and the campaign is merely an outlet. What they players want has sometimes been a hurdle or impediment to my grand and glorious epic.

Sometimes, no matter what the PCs did, it had no impact on the story. As a result my players responded with grander and bolder acts of defiance in