"Where Do You Keep All That Stuff?" - Storing Things on Your Person

How much can you hold?  I'm not talking about carrying capacity - there are already rules for that and I encourage you to use them.  I'm talking about potions - where do you keep them?  How many can you easily store?  I'm talking about arrows.  Do you remember buying a quiver at the start of the game?  Where exactly do you fit your 40 arrows?  I'm talking about weapons.  You can't just scroll through your entire inventory of weapons like Gordon Freeman, you've got to put them somewhere.

Most of the time, this is just sort of abstracted.  The character has a backpack they probably store things in, but everything they need in battle at the moment is always right there on their belt, even that cold iron morningstar they found in the crypt a month ago and the potion of invisibility they've been carrying around since their first adventure.

This makes the average adventurer seem like a bad 90s comic book hero.

Rob Liefeld, via progressiveboink

"I don't need to worry about encumbrance because I have the belt of many pockets, 

the pants of crotch-asterisk, and a magnetic back."

The following items in gold are available as Open Game Content under the OGL.  Open Game Content is ©2015 Jonah Bomgaars and d20 Despot.

4 Rules You Probably Aren't Using Correctly (And Why You Should)

You know the problem with rulebooks?  There's just so many darn rules!  I know how it is - some rules are just too complicated or time consuming to enforce.  Maybe you were a new GM and you jettisoned those minor rules that just slowed things down.  Maybe you were running a game for some new players and you didn't want to scare them away with these extraneous rules.  And then you sort of let them slip away, because the game worked just perfectly without them.

Well... I think it's time to re-evaluate some of those rules.  I've played a fair amount of D&D in my time, and I've read of and heard a lot of other peoples' stories as well.  From the experiences of myself and others, I've identified a few rules that often get ignored (not all the time - very possibly not even in your games - but often).  Now, I totally understand why these rules don't always get used: I've neglected many of them myself.  But they were written for a reason, and I think they might benefit from a little extra love.

Treasure: 5 Tips and Tricks for Making Your Treasure Hoards More Memorable

The Fishpool Hoard: British Museum.  Photo: d20 Despot

Treasure.  It's a big part of playing D&D.  It is often one of the primary motivations for adventuring.  But how often is it truly memorable?  How often are your players as impressed by their haul as their characters should be?

So often, after a big fight, games of D&D turn into games of accounting.  "You find 2,500 gold pieces, 1,000 silver, and two rubies worth 500 gp each.  Also, everyone gets 1,200 XP."  While treasure and experience are both rewards for a job well done, they should not be treated in the same way.  XP is a numerical abstraction of your character's growth and skill - it is intangible to the character.  Treasure, however, is an in-game reward, and is very tangible to the character.  Yet too often, just as XP becomes a number that players use to invests in better powers, gp becomes just a number that players invest in better equipment.  Finding treasure should be a roleplaying opportunity, not a simple exercise in accounting.

Let's take a look at some tips and tricks to making treasure interesting, exciting, believable, and memorable.