D&D

See Your Stories Like Never Before Hamlet's Hit Points presents a toolkit that helps make storytelling in any RPG easier and more fun by classifying story beats and letting you track their ups and downs from hope to fear and back. Armed with these tools, you'll be equipped to lay compelling track for an emotional roller-coaster that will keep everyone at your game table involved, excited, riveted. In these pages, you'll find definitions of nine critical story beats. You'll read about the relationships between those beats. You'll also find complete analyses of three stories you know already—Hamlet, Casablanca, and Dr. No—to show you how the system works. Written with roleplayers in mind, Hamlet's Hit Points is an indispensable tool for understanding stories, in games and everywhere else.

From the creator of the popular blog The Monsters Know What They’re Doing comes a compilation of villainous battle plans for Dungeon Masters. In the course of a Dungeons & Dragons game, a Dungeon Master has to make one decision after another in response to player behavior—and the better the players, the more unpredictable their behavior! It’s easy for even an experienced DM to get bogged down in on-the-spot decision-making or to let combat devolve into a boring slugfest, with enemies running directly at the player characters and biting, bashing, and slashing away. In The Monsters Know What They’re Doing, Keith Ammann lightens the DM’s burden by helping you understand your monsters’ abilities and develop battle plans before your fifth edition D&D game session begins. Just as soldiers don’t whip out their field manuals for the first time when they’re already under fire, a DM shouldn’t wait until the PCs have just encountered a dozen bullywugs to figure out how they advance, fight, and retreat. Easy to read and apply, The Monsters Know What They're Doing is essential reading for every DM.

You’re a good dungeon master. You’ve read both Dungeon Master’s guides. You’ve run a few games. You pick up ideas here and there on the net. Or maybe you're an old grizzled vet who has run games for 20 years. Maybe your game is feeling a little stale. Maybe your encounters didn’t run exactly as you wanted them too. Maybe you feel like you're stuck in a rut. Maybe you feel a bit overwhelmed when you have to come up with an exciting, creative game every week. You’re not looking for a huge tome on game theory. You don’t need yet another take on world-building. You’re looking for some practical tips you can use today to help you focus your energy in the right places and make some kick-ass D&D games for you and your friends. You want something you can read quick and start using right away. My friend, here is the book for you. This book was written to give you solid usable tips to help you build your story, design exciting encounters, and run a great game when you’re at the table. It’s a short book, designed to be read quickly and referenced often. Oh yeah, and it’s got some awesome original artwork by Jared Von Hindman of Head Injury Theater. This is a completely original book. Every chapter was written from scratch to help you focus on what’s important and get past some of the roadblocks we all face when designing a D&D game.

M.T. Black is one of the most successful indie-creators on the D&D scene, with more than fifty platinum best-sellers and over a hundred thousand book sales. In this practical and engaging book, he steps you through his creative process while sharing the principles, tricks, and secrets he has learned along the way. A fantastic resource for beginners and professionals alike, there is no other book quite like it!