A cloaked figure stands alone on still water under a full moon. Nobody is fighting yet. Everything is about to happen. Every table knows the scene that follows. The dragon lands, the party stands its ground, and one player picks up the d20 while everyone else stops breathing. We showed that picture, a green dragon over a party of four,…
In the 2014 rules, exhaustion was a ladder of six different punishments. Level 1 gave you Disadvantage on ability checks. Level 4 halved your Hit Point maximum. Level 5 set your Speed to 0. Nobody remembered which rung did what, so most tables looked it up every time, or quietly never used it. The 2024 rules replace the ladder with…
Obojima: Tales from Yatamon arrives on D&D Beyond on 27 October 2026. It is the second Obojima book from 1985 Games: a 160-page supplement for the 2024 rules (5.5e) set in Yatamon, the island's biggest city, with three new subclasses including the Neko Duelist Fighter. The hardcover is on pre-order and ships in December 2026. James has wanted to play…
Look at the picture at the top of this page. It is a dragon, or a hand's width of one. Every scale is the size of a shield, every crack as long as your arm, and you can't see where it ends. That is how a Gargantuan dragon looks from the ground. You don't see the monster. You see its…
A green dragon bursts out of the waterfall with its mouth open. Nobody at the table needs the stat block read out. You know what it is, you know what it wants, and you know how you feel about it. That is the gift of dragons: they are obvious. The game is named for them. They are the one monster…
A coin has two sides and one job: be fair. It is not quite fair. A person flipping a coin by thumb lands it on the side it started on about 51% of the time [1][2]. That one percent is where this post lives. Chance is the maths of what the dice do. Luck is the story we tell about…
Psychologists have a name for the story you tell about yourself: narrative identity, "a person's internalized and evolving life story, integrating the reconstructed past and imagined future to provide life with some degree of unity and purpose" [1]. D&D lets you write a draft of that story with training wheels on. You can try out who you might become and…
