Reprint: This article was originally published 4/18/2008

I write too much.

This is not a new or sudden revelation. I've known since college that I could fill a notebook with ideas when preparing for a night's game of Dungeons & Dragons. I might write 12,000 words to describe a three-story arc adventure, and use 1/4 of what I'd written. That’s grossly inefficient, but it was no big deal. I had the time, what I wrote would eventually get recycled into some other adventure, and even if it didn't, that was ok too. After all, it's about journey, not the destination right?

Except now I don't have the time. The hours I used to spend crafting my Dungeons & Dragons campaign are gone, devoured by two fun little monsters for whom quiet time is the villain and bed time the enemy. What I used to spend three weeknights putting together must now be accomplished in an hour, two if I'm lucky. My initial solution to the problem wasn't a solution at all: I simply stopped game mastering.

High-level play within D&D 3rd Edition is hard. Whether you’re playing 3.0 or 3.5, the end result is the same: thousands of feats, hundreds of prestige classes and gods-only-know how many spells give rise to complicated game mechanics that slow play to a crawl.  Iterative attacks, in which high-level martial classes like the fighter or ranger get four or five attacks every round add to the complexity as people calculate to hits and damage … and then have to do it all over again when they remember to factor in some party-buffing spell the cleric cast last round.

But is it unplayable? Or has everyone simply assumed it is?

D&D 4th Edition -- particularly the Player's Handbook -- taken a lot of criticism for being 99% crunch, and 1% fluff. It's also taken hits for the gutting of many of the role-playing aspects from earlier editions, including skills like craft, profession, and perform.

All of this is true, but 4E's saving grace is the Dungeon Master's Guide which provides much of the framework for supporting role-playing that the PHB is lacking. Now it's a legitimate complaint that this is putting almost all of the role-playing heavy lifting on the DM's shoulders, but in truth, I suspect that's where it lies in a good many campaigns.

One of the DMG's better ideas is the Skill Challenge.

Martin Rayla has a great thread over on Treasure Tables about using music in your game. He's not talking just about having something going on in the background, but also crafting a soundtrack that matches the expected actions, fights and drama that the players will be experiencing.

I've used music in my games before, but I've never made a concerted effort to sync up what was playing with the "on screen" action. That said, it's something I've wanted to do for a while, and our recent playtest of Battlestar Galactica gave me an excellent opportunity to try my hand at hobbling together a score of my own.

A while back at My Play,  Gerald Cameron proposed the idea of the "BHAC" (Big, Hairy, Audacious Campaign), the sort of campaign that's earth-trembling huge its shear audacity and (I'm assuming) its variance from the norm. 

He throws out one example: normal D&D campaigns usually have a home town or city ... what happens if that city is build on the corpse of a tarrasque? It spawned a corresponding conversation over at Treasure Tables, with examples like a world overrun by vampires, a world in which everyone has superpowers, and one where giants rule over millions of humanoid slaves.

A few years ago, I decided I wanted to try a different kind of role-playing game campaign: a medieval urban fantasy that combined traditional story telling with the sort of open-ended, sandbox-like openness of games like Grand Theft Auto.

The setting would be Obsidian Bay, the homegrown metropolis that my friends and I had spent the last seven years building and using as the base of operations for our Blackrazor Guild campaign. The city had expanded haphazardly to fit the needs of our campaign: new non-player characters arose when some new niche needed filling, or at the service of some ongoing story. Even so, while the city was home to most of the player characters, the lion's share of adventures happened elsewhere, outside the city limits.

My gaming group is thinking about restarting our long-slumbering Battletech campaign, in which we play a group of mercenaries known as the Hellfire Aces. In the campaign's earlier iteration, we didn't go much deeper than that -- we were the Aces, we were for hire, and we blew things up. This time around we're looking to add a role-playing component to turn it into more than just a a fragfest between giant robots.

Wizards of the Coast is releasing a Magic Item Compendium reprinting 750 magic items from previous publications and Dragon Magazine articles, while adding in 500 new items.

In anticipation of its release later this month, they're running a series of articles by Andy Collins, one of the book's designers. In the first article he talks about how many players focus on a six specific classes of magic items and tend to ignore almost everything else. He's right -- when creating or buying their own magic items, players tend to focus on what gives them their biggest bang for their buck, so items like +1 long swords and gloves of dexterity +2 win out over rods of enemy detection or helms of underwater action.

When it comes to pen-and-paper role-playing games, one of things that causes the most consternation for non-gamers is the concept of character death and the effect this has on players in the campaign. While bible-thumpers may focus on the spell-casting and pantheonic aspects of games like Dungeons and Dragons, I've found that most mainstream concerns focus character death, and the alleged effect this has on players.

The logic goes like this: an individual plays a character, and over the course of several months, becomes so emotionally invested in said character than when he or she shrugs of this mortal coil, the player can't handle it. He or she becomes unhinged with results running from suicide to murder to pacts with the devil.

And lo, a great many spammers visit the forums of Nuketown and The Griffin's Crier, descending like a plague of locusts upon the land. They come seeking page rankings from their great link god Google, and thus, offer endless sacrifices of strange herbs, impossible enhancements and the vast riches of Nigeria.

Yet from this plague would come some good. All of the names which follow belong to spammers. And all must die. To that end, we, the Dungeon Masters of the Blackrazor Guild, shall name the henchmen and disposable minions of our most terrible villains using the monikers of these vile scum. What had been an anonymous, meaningless death at the hands of dungeon-delving adventurers will now be steeped in meaning -- the meaning that comes from knowing that you just drove a sword through the guts of some weasley spammer.