I play D&D. There are a thousand initiative trackers out there. Here’s one I invented recently.
First, each player picks a Meeple to be their character’s mini.
Quick, roll initiative! The players all roll, and so do the enemies. We grab a second meeple for each player, as well as second token for each enemy. This becomes the initiative tracker.
This is the initiative order. It’s currently the red meeple hero’s turn. Next up will be the blue meeple hero, then the black cube enemy, and so on.
Infocom introduced (AFAIK) the concept of feelies:
[…] Imaginative props and extras tied to the game’s theme—provided copy protection against copyright infringement.[45] Some games were unsolvable without the extra content provided with the boxed game. And because of the cleverness and uniqueness of the feelies, users rarely felt like they were an intrusion or inconvenience, as was the case with most of the other copy-protection schemes of the time.[49] Feelies also provided the player with a physical aspect to the gameplay of their text adventures, giving another dimension of strategy to what would other-wise just be a text parser.
– Wikipedia (Infocom)
I love to give out feelies for my D&D campaigns. Here are some lil handout props I made:
I used a receipt printer, q-tips, tape, and orthodontic rubber bands.
I’ve been working on a spell guide for D&D games. During the process, I researched the differences between the Dungeons and Dragons 5e Player’s Handbook (PHB) and the 5e System Reference Document (SRD).
For those that don’t know, in 3e Wizards of the Coast released the core rules of the game for free. They’ve continued to do so for 3.5, 4, and 5e. The 5e rules were released under Creative Commons recently (thanks!), in response to some community backlash over proposed licensing changes (eek!).
There are 361 spells in the PHB, but only 318 in the SRD. Which are missing?
Here are the 43 spells in the PHB but not the SRD:
Why are they missing? Well, the official WoTC answer is:
In general, the criteria for what went into the SRD is if it (1) was in the 3E SRD, (2) has an equivalent in 5th edition D&D, and (3) is vital to how a class, magic item, or monster works. For example, the 3E SRD has the delay poison spell, but in 5th edition that’s handled by the protection from poison spell, so protection from poison is in the SRD.
Wizards of the Coast, SRD5.1 FAQ
Looking at the actual list, every single spell missing was (1) not in the 3E SRD, (2) was added in 5E. I was curious what fraction of new 5E spells got added to the SRD vs. not, but it looks like no one has a list of new 5E spells, so I couldn’t easily check.
The following are renamed but present in the SRD, presumably for trademark reasons:
