Alphastream

The Alphastream Game Design Blog

Why Classic Adventures Offer Characters Meaningless Death

Classic D&D often presents situations forcing a quick and meaningless death. Modern editions are often accused of being too easy. Why has the game changed, and what is the point of character death today?

April 7, 2022 · 10 Comments

The Best and Worst of Adventure Formats at Winter Fantasy 2020

In the search for more open play, D&D has made changes to adventure format. At the Winter Fantasy convention we saw how it worked.

February 20, 2020 · 4 Comments

Which Products to Buy During a DMs Guild Sale!

A huge sale on the DMs Guild? Here are the products I think should be a part of every gamer’s collection!

January 24, 2018 · Leave a comment

Critical Role and Bringing Emotional Investment to Campaigns

Critical Role, the acclaimed and influential livestream series, showcases how a campaign can create emotional invested players. Find out how to create emotionally rich play in your campaign.

November 16, 2017 · 1 Comment

Return of the Classics – Why 5E is Such a Success

Which adventures are considered D&D classics? How is it that 3E and 4E produced so few, if any, classics? And, let’s reveal how 5E is bringing back the classics!

January 4, 2017 · 16 Comments

The Magic of Items

Does a certain number of magic items per PC make D&D Next better? There are better and more important questions to ask.

October 20, 2015

D&D Next: A Touch of Class

Class, subclass, build, kit, theme… just what goes into defining a character’s class?
What do we gain, and how best can we reflect commonalities and differences between the different varieties of classes in the game?

October 20, 2015

D&D Next: A Model for Skills

How D&D Next can bring skills and feats into the game in ways that stimulate imaginative story-telling, creativity, and engaging play.

October 20, 2015

Interlude: D&D Next and Magic Items

D&D Next moves away from PCs being reliant upon many magic items, but does it go far enough to bring back flavor and creativity?

October 16, 2015

Addendum: DnD Next Monster Design and Organized Play

Organized play aims to create fun adventures DMs can run easily. Comparing organized play’s monster formats across the editions is an excellent lens by which to study monster design and identify a path for the future.

October 14, 2015

The Threat of D&D Next Monster Design

Should D&D Next stat blocks be so plain? Let’s compare them to a similar 4E monster and identify how the format could improve.

October 14, 2015

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