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Owlbear Rodeo: A Simple D&D Virtual Tabletop
If you're seeking a lightweight virtual tabletop, try out Owlbear Rodeo. It's awesome. Covid-19 forced many DMs to move games from in-person to online. For a lot of us, running games online is an...
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Running Descent into Avernus Chapter 3
Note: this article contains spoilers for Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus. This article is one of a series of articles covering the D&D hardcover campaign adventure Baldur's Gate: Descent into...
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Running Wars, Big Battles, and Massive Combat in D&D
D&D is designed to cover the stories of a small party of characters adventuring in a land of high fantasy. Sometimes the story of these characters goes into areas not covered well by the rules in...
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The Minimum Viable D&D Game
What is the minimum preparation we need to run a great D&D game? In a previous article we've explored what we might do if we spend an entire day preparing for a D&D game and Return of the Lazy...
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Understanding Surprise in D&D 5e
A few of 5th edition D&D's rules aren't quite as simple and clear as we'd like. How surprise works is one of those. Today we're going to dig deep into surprise, how the rules are intended to work,...
View ArticleD&D 5e Numbers to Keep In Your Head
Note: This article has been updated since the original written in February 2015. The following tools are intended to make it easier to improvise situations in your D&D games. These numbers are...
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Darkvision Isn't As Good As You Think
Creatures with darkvision in darkness have disadvantage on Wisdom (Perception) checks and -5 to their passive perception. Light up those torches, dungeon explorers! In many D&D games, any sort of...
View ArticleReplace Flanking with Cinematic Advantage
New to Sly Flourish? Start Here! Instead of using the optional flanking rule, offer deals to players to trade ability checks using in-world features to gain advantage on their next attack. Chapter 8...
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Pointcrawls for Cities and Overland Travel in D&D
New to Sly Flourish? Start Here! A pointcrawl is a DM tool for handling overland travel in D&D. Much like building a dungeon from rooms and hallways, pointcrawls are built from meaningful...
View ArticleA DM's Reading List
New to Sly Flourish? Start Here! This article contains a reading list of some of my favorite books and articles DMs can use to better run D&D games. Obviously it would be crass of me to include my...
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Running Descent into Avernus Chapter 4 and 5
New to Sly Flourish? Start Here! This article offers tips and tricks for running Chapters 4 and 5 of Descent into Avernus and includes my thoughts and recommendations for the adventure overall. Note...
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Building Villains Like Pro-Wrestlers
New to Sly Flourish? Start Here! I read a fantastic Reddit post called How to Create Pay-Per-View Worthy Adventures or How to Stop Worrying and Start DMing Like Vince McMahon I wanted to ponder and...
View ArticleHandling Rests in D&D
New to Sly Flourish? Start Here! The frequency of rests, both long rests and short rests, is critical to the pacing of our D&D games. Too many rests and the characters enter every situation armed...
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Rime of the Frostmaiden Session Zero
New to Sly Flourish? Start Here! This article discusses how to run a session zero for the D&D hardcover adventure, Rime of the Frostmaiden and contains spoilers for the adventure. For a video on...
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Gems of the D&D Dungeon Master's Guide
New to Sly Flourish? Start Here! The Dungeon Master's Guide is an under-appreciated and undervalued tome of useful information and tools for D&D Dungeon Masters. Today we're going to look at some...
View ArticleEnding Campaigns
New to Sly Flourish? Start Here! At some point our D&D campaigns come to an end, hopefully by a point in the story and not due to real-life events. Today we'll talk about how to run awesome...
View ArticleRun Easy Battles
New to Sly Flourish? Start Here! Run easy battles. Easy battles are a wonderful tool for D&D DMs. They add upward beats to your game when you need them. They open up interesting options for...
View ArticleSafety Tools
New to Sly Flourish? Start Here! Safety tools provide simple rules to make sure everyone's comfortable and having a good time during our D&D games. There are a lot of different safety tools we can...
View ArticleRunning D&D Combat with an Abstract Battle Map
New to Sly Flourish? Start Here! We often break up D&D combat into two categories: combat on a 5 foot per square grid (which we'll refer to as "gridded combat"), and running combat with pure...
View ArticleRunning Session Zeros
New to Sly Flourish? Start Here! Both Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything describe running a session zero for your D&D games. This article summarizes one approach...
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