Mike Mearls Games

Stepping Back to Step Forward

I love that Shadowdark - a quite good fusion of OSR and 5e that I happily recommend - strips ability modifiers from damage rolls.

Adding your Strength bonus to your attack and damage rolls is classic legacy D&D design. It made sense from...

Layering Abilities in TTRPG Design

In TTRPGs, the intersection of the action economy and content design yields gameplay. You can think of your action economy as your fuel or energy budget. It tells you how much stuff you can do. Your content design then layers on top. It's what you...

System Design: Where Stuff Goes

In my last post, I shared my house rules for two-weapon fighting in 5e. I mentioned that I preferred that for the rules for dual wielding to appear in the core rules, rather than under the description of a weapon trait. Swiss Calavera asked in the...

Two Weapon Fighting

I'm not crazy about how D&D '24 handles two-weapon fighting. I was never crazy about it in 5e in general, but it feels like it has gotten harder to use. Here is my patch.

Two-Weapon Fighting

When you use the Attack...

Dungeon Exploration

When the characters explore a location, they seek to gain information and uncover secrets against the backdrop of an ongoing threat. In classic dungeon exploration, the characters must weigh the dangers of encountering monsters against the benefit...

Exploration in 5e

D&D's three pillars Interaction works well in the game, and I like how the 2024 revision cleans those rules up, and combat is great as long as your encounter design has interesting monsters and accounts for the action economy. We'll get to th...

Design Revisions

I'm taking a break from monsters to loop back to subclasses for today's post. I thought it would be interesting to look at the process of revising design and how playtesting affects it.

I have two players using the a rouge subclass I designe...

Monster Design Update

Hello everyone!

I've been regularly running three (or more!) games a week, testing out the new approach to monsters and some of the new subclasses. A few notes on things before we get back to our regular schedule of new monsters and other go...

Aspects and Monsters

If you haven't at least read the FATE RPG, I highly recommend it. Reading new RPGs is like having a deep conversation with another DM about how they run games. Someone ran RPGs and decided to encode their approach to the game in a book. The insigh...

Your Encounter Areas are (Probably) Too Small

If you find that the fights you set up in D&D are dull or grindy, your encounter areas might be too small. It's a common issue in published adventures, so it's not surprising that it also crosses over to DMs running home games.

Most char...

Initiative, Dice, and Dramatic Tension

Timing is the best tool in a storyteller's kit. By their very nature, stories are artifacts of time. They unspool in acts, with tension rising and falling over time, before the story ends at its most dramatic moment.

Combat should follow a s...

Static Initiative

In the comments in one of my recent posts, Swiss Calavera talked about the asymmetry of my design work here. That's very intentional. DMs need a different set of tools than players. A player manages a single character with a deep bench of spells, ...

It Came from the Swamp!

In my Wednesday game, the characters tangled with a group of frog humanoids and this fun little champion (champion = a creature worth two characters in a fight). A few things I tried with this design.

Bigger Damage: My ...

General TTRPG Musings

Hey all! I've started a newsletter on Substack where I talk about general TTRPG observations, thoughts on specific RPGs, and other random topics. My 5e and adjacent game design will continue here, but for broader stuff I'm using Substack. I'm not ...

Troglodyte Stat Blocks

I'm using images until I figure out a better way to present stat blocks, perhaps as a PDF.

In any case, I'm starting off this week with some troglodyte stat blocks I've created for my home 5e games. A few things to point out with these creat...

Mistakes are Creative Fertilizer

It's Friday afternoon, which means I've wrapped up my game sessions for the week. Now it's time to take a look at which parts of my design worked, and which didn't.

This week I (re-)learned an important lesson about math and game design. Usi...

Simpler Aboleth

I was asked to try tackling a more complex monster. The first critter in the SRD is the aboleth, so here is my revision of it.

I tried using an aboleth in an encounter years ago and it was deeply frustrating. It has wonky, complex mechanics ...

Stat Block Example

Let’s see if this works, since images are not showing up on mobile. Here’s a picture of the complete, reduced stat block.

What Do We Really Need in a Stat Block?

A D&D stat block needs to find the Goldilocks zone between too much and too little information. I can think of several times in the past few months where I overlooked something during a game, or struggled to make a monster interesting for lack...

Designing Monster Groups

In my experience as a designer and DM, the best monsters express a clear identity and a tactical challenge in their design. That goes double for monsters you expect to use in a group. Otherwise, a mob of goblins feels the same as a mob of gnolls. ...

The Great Escape!

As I work on monsters, I'm coming around to the idea that the DM needs an action economy that is distinct from what the players use. Counters have worked well in play. Since 5e doesn't give monsters levels in character classes, there's no real rea...

Wizard School of Chronomancy

Time is a fundamental building block of the cosmos, yet even the gods seem reluctant to tamper with its mechanisms. Chronomancers seek to unravel time’s mysteries. Few wizards embrace this school, as its history is littered with stories of mages...

Wizard Subclass Design

Wizard subclasses are difficult to design. The 2014 PHB covers all the schools of magic, the lens D&D traditionally uses to describe a wizard’s specialization. There’s a reason why supplements after the core rules rarely added more wizard ...

Creatures and Terrain

I promised the wizard write up this week, but COVID knocked my schedule around a bit. Plus, I've been a bit obsessed with monsters. Did you know that hyenas eat their prey alive? That's creepy and something that is informing my gnoll design work.<...

Avoiding One Shot Boss Fights

My last post gave an example of a monster feature that made it difficult to shut down a creature before reducing it to half hit points. A few commenters pointed out that such a mechanic would make all boss fights feel the same. Hammer a creature t...

Monsters and Conditions

Intrepid reader Michael SIxel ran an encounter using the troll (thank you Michael!) and it was overwhelmed by a casting of Tasha's Hideous Laughter (sorry Michael!).

Conditions are an Achilles heel for any monster meant to take on more than ...

Monsters, Monsters, Monsters!

I’m almost done with the series on subclass design, with only the wizard to go. To let that series wrap up at the end of next week, I’m dropping in a post on monsters to balance out the schedule. It’s a little preview of the next phase of my...

Warlock Death Pact

Death comes to us all, but some warlocks seek to begin that relationship much earlier in their lives. Warlocks who take on Death are rare. They come to this power only after an encounter with Death itself, the entity responsible for shepherding so...

Warlock Subclass Design

From its first appearance in 3e’s Complete Arcane, the warlock is one of those rare D&D concepts that graduated from a supplemental book into the core game. Back in 3e the warlock was cool because its magical abilities were almost e...

Sorcerer Light Bearer

Light bearers are chosen, rather than made. Sometimes, the life-giving energies of the positive plane, the realm from which all life force emerges, reacts to the rise of death, shadow, and doom. Whether guided by some intellect or acting as a natu...