Happy 50th Birthday D&D Community!

On the last Sunday in January 50 years ago, a shoe repairman and amateur game designer invited his circle of friends over to his house for games. In those days, games were focused on simulations of historical battles, whether with cardboard chits on game boards or miniature figurines arrayed on a sand table.

That Sunday, though, something different was in the offering.

That cobbled, Gary Gygax, had copies for sale of his new game, Dungeons & Dragons. That amateur game designer was about to become a pro, and that pro was about to change the gaming world. We don’t know who showed up that Sunday and who bought Gary’s new game that day. But what we do know is that, 50 years later, that tiny group has grown to become the millions of people who make up the tabletop roleplaying community.

Over the coming year, I am going to expand the 5e system beyond the limits we see today. The game as we know it today is just a starting point. Like the imagination it supports, it is limited only by our ambition and our daring.

Today I present to you an alpha test version of a dragon, a nasty little piece of work named Xargath, along with his minions. We’re getting a little ahead of the year of the Dragon, but I suspect dragons (like wizards) are neither late nor early. They arrive exactly on time.

Xargath is built with two new systems that you’ll see a lot more of over the coming year on my Patreon, among others.

First is the concept of phased action monsters. Combat is a bear to prep and manage as a DM. It’s hard enough picking out creatures. You then need to come up with their tactics, and then weather the vagaries of die rolls and bookkeeping to make an encounter work. Phased action monsters introduce an element of scripting that enables reliable combinations between monsters, cuts down on rules tracking, and creates more dynamic encounters.

Second is the system of Challenge Points used to build encounters. Challenge Points allow the DM to get a better sense of an encounter’s balance, scale an encounter more easily to account for the size of their group, and better forecast an encounter’s difficulty. You can find the bones of that system here: https://github.com/mikemearls/5e_point_encounters

My mission is to offer tools that make being a DM more fun, easier, and more exciting than ever ever. The rules of the game exist to enable your imagination, not limit it. As 5e enters its second decade, it’s time to push the game to new frontiers.