Happy Birthday Knight at the Opera: 6 Years of Blogging

I started this blog 6 years ago. Here was the last retrospective. It contains the origin story and some badly-aged advice.

In the time since then, A Knight at the Opera has slowed down pretty significantly. Its best days are likely behind it. On average, I get a fraction of the views now compared to just two or three years ago. My own habits have gotten worse. I post less frequently. My drafts folder has grown to around 60 unfinished posts at any given time. I don't cut my post's length down nearly as much as I used to (although I also usually don't allow the first draft to get nearly so long to begin with. The average length of my posts has actually decreased over the years, believe it or not).

All the same, RPG blogging kind of took over my life, and it's brought me so many good things. I'm going to take a moment to talk about that, and a few other things.

Appendix T&T

This post is part of the "Appendix N" blog bandwagon. I decided to share some of the many influences that have shaped a game I've been working on for a few years called Tricks & Treats.

It's a game about having spooky adventures on Halloween. You roleplay as kids and teenagers celebrating the best holiday ever, taking advantage of a rare night of unsupervised freedom, navigating the complex and unforgiving social landscape of adolescence, and investigating a mysterious horror that needs to be thwarted in order to save the day.

It's built for one-shot mini-sandbox scenarios, each one revolving around a major Halloween activity (trick-or-treating, going to a haunted house, attending a costume party, etc.). They always prominently feature a cast of NPCs thoroughly stocked with conflicts, rumors, and various hooks, and a unique "puzzle monster" that can't be defeated without gathering clues and forming a clever strategy.

There are many obvious cultural touchstones that you can connect to this game. You might expect the Appendix N to include things like Goosebumps, Hocus Pocus, The Monster Squad, The Goonies, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, etc. Maybe even adult horror like IT and Halloween. And like, sure. Those things are all part of this game. But they weren't part of what I personally put into it.

That's what this post is about. If someone playing it says "wow this is really giving Scooby Doo" or "I'm getting big Over the Garden Wall vibes from this" then that's awesome. By all means, bring those influences to it when you play. But those aren't my influences. These works are.

Board Game Endings, Ranked

This is my tier list for "ways that board games end." Either the trigger for the ending or the way you evaluate the results or whatever. Anything having to do with the ending of a board game. Many of these are mutually compatible, obviously.

I've put them in order of worst to best, and I've included some examples of board games for each one. However, that doesn't mean I'm rating the whole game based on that tier. Diplomacy remains my beloved.

This post is an olive branch to Quinns after my last post.

Review of Initiative Methods

After collecting as many initiative methods into one post as I possibly could, I offered to write a review of them. A few people were interested, and I like having an excuse to exorcise my blog demons. I'm not going to touch on every single method in that list, and I'm not going to give numerical ratings or thumbs up/down or anything like that. I'll tell you what I see as the pros and cons of each major category and whether I personally find them to be worth it. I'll also single out a few particular methods if I have a noteworthy point to make about them. Heads up if you want to follow along with the big list post: I'm not going to review the categories in the same order. You'll see why soon.

Before diving in, I also want to state up front: I frequently see people heaping praise upon an initiative method, calling it revolutionary and preaching to anyone who will listen to adopt it... but they mostly cite pretty unremarkable advantages. Things like, "the GM doesn't have to write anything down" or "there's no dice rolling needed." Uhhhh yeah?

I suspect that those people are probably just describing the first method they've ever encountered that wasn't the "default" option they know from modern D&D (i.e. turn-based, individual, randomized). This is a common phenomenon I've seen my whole life: an RPG hobbyist who's only ever played WotC D&D makes first contact with literally any other game and is immediately convinced it's the greatest game of all time.*

*For me, it was Fantasy Craft.

What I'm saying is, Popcorn Initiative really isn't that special, y'all. It's merely better than one of the worst options.

Urban Gameplay Bibliography

This is my best attempt at cataloguing all the sources I've read while trying to learn more about urban gameplay in D&D-like games. This is partly because it may interest you and partly because I don't want people recommending me stuff I've already read. Or if they are recommending me something new, they might read this list and realize "oh, wait, the thing I'm recommending won't actually add much to what this guy already knows." And you might also be interested in these things. A lot of ideas in here I ended up not agreeing with, but you might.

EVERY Initiative Method??

Not really. But maybe, with your help, we actually can. Let's give this a shot.

Every now and then I've seen a blog post attempting to cover this topic and they always just seem to fall short. "There are two methods: individual and side." Please. Not only are there dozens of ways of doing initiative, but many of them are desperately in need of a proper name at this point.

But exhaustively cataloguing every method is unfeasible. There are so many games that have nearly identical methods but with just a teensy tiny little quirk. "Instead of rolling a d20, you roll a d10." Yeah, whatever. I'm not about to list every single one of those as an individual entry. Some degree of broad categorization is needed.

But you will quickly see that my system of categorization is... feeble. I have unfortunately not been able to divine some grand system of fundamental initiative typology, easily charted along 6 key axes or something like that. You'll come to see why pretty soon, and we'll circle back to that topic in the conclusion. I instead tried to order my categories by vaguely-increasing order of general unfamiliarity / difficulty to explain and understand. We'll see how it goes.

[This post received a major update on June 6, 2025, for future comment-readers. There was also an addendum posted here]

Deconstructed Ravenloft for Dinner - Mindstorm Guest Blog

This year, my friend Ty is taking his blog mindstormpress.com on tour, and I'm lucky enough to be honored with one of his highly-prized articles. I've said some pretty harsh things about Ravenloft in the past, so of course I was delighted to see Ty take that as a challenge. I think you'll agree, the results are top notch. Please enjoy this excellent guest post, and be sure to go check out Mindstorm afterwards if you aren't already following his work.

-Dwiz

Deconstructed Ravenloft for Dinner

Since its inception, Ravenloft and the fearsome Strahd have captured the hearts and minds of tabletop gamers everywhere. From the first published edition—made for AD&D—all the way to the mass-marketed, bloated, and hyper-commercialized iteration for fifth edition, people have been delving into the lands beyond the mist and trying to fight the big daddy vampire.

What makes the adventure and setting so dang captivating? And, more importantly, can we break it down into its base components, inspect those components, replace them, and then force everything back together? Sometimes, the best way to play with legos is to smash your big sibling’s castle and then try to put it back together before they get home. Our version of Ravenloft is going to slap because it’s going to be personal, homemade, and filled with our own unique interests and idiosyncrasies.

Strap in. We’re hot-dropping into Barovia for the biggest heist imaginable. We’re taking the ideas.

Product Identity? In MY Monsters?

It's more likely than you think.

Notorious bird Prismatic Wasteland is up to his antics again trying to get decent, law-abiding folks to weasel their way around legal trouble, and I'm here to help.

I put together a similar list a while back and I figure it's worth sharing.

First, More Names for the Monsters He Covered

Mind-Flayer: Bathalian (Reaper Minis), Cephalid (Dark Sword Minis), Mind Lasher (Old School Essentials), Octopoid/Gastropoid (The Black Hack), Philosophers (Zak S), Brain Fiend (Fantasy Craft), and, arguably, Genestealers (Warhammer 40K).

Beholder: Eye Tyrant (the alternate, generic name they already have in D&D), Eye Beast (Reaper Minis), Eye of Terror (Old School Essentials), Gazer (Dragon's Crown), Watcher in the Dark (Fantasy Craft).

Personally, the name I'm using is an Oculus.

Yuan-Ti: FUCK YOU WARREN, DEMON SNAKE MEN RULE

...Just... just get rid of the Orientalism, they'll be fine. Really.

I offer to you: Nagendra (Reaper Minis), Librarians (Zak S), and... that's all I could find. Really disappointed to see how many companies just go with "snake men" or "snake folk" for these guys.

Now, For Some Other Monsters

Bullywugs: Gullygugs (Old School Essentials), Boggards (Pathfinder), Squogs (Reaper Minis), Boglings (Greg Gillespie's adventures), and one of my own, Croaks.

Kuo-Toa: Deep Ones (Lovecraft, and seemingly the "default" name instead of "fish-folk" or something terrible), Dagonites (Otherworld Minis), Dagathonan (Dark Sword Minis), Pelagic (Darkest Dungeon).

Myconid (which isn't actually protected, but people like coming up with alternate names): Shrooman (Dungeon Crawl Classics), Funginids (Veins of the Earth), Fungoids (Reaper Minis), Sporling (Fantasy Craft), Mycelian (Old School Essentials).

Personally, what I really need is a good-sounding generic word for "bug-person." Can't (and don't want to) use "Thri-Kreen" or "Formian" from D&D, and everything else I've heard was way too setting-specific or bug-specific. What do y'all got?

-Dwiz

Not All Balance is the Same

Artist Credit: Wayne Reynolds

This is a spiritual sequel to a previous post about crunch. Everyone uses the word "balance" in reference to something in RPGs but they frequently use it to refer to different things. Sometimes completely unrelated things. And yet it's become intensely emotionally-charged despite being, essentially, a non-word.

So while you very likely have strong opinions about this word, it might be useful to take a closer look. In this article, I'm going to examine six ways that the word "balance" commonly comes up when discussing RPGs, and why it's important to recognize that they are indeed distinct.

As usual, I will mostly be making reference to ol' D&D as my primary example, but don't mistake that for meaning that this only carries relevance to D&D alone. All kinds of gaming philosophies might benefit from a little bit of thought about these six different meanings for the word "balance," even if there are some that you can safely dismiss. So yeah, balance matters to other crunchy games like GURPS and Lancer and Genesys-system stuff of course, but it can also come up in your rules-lite games, story games, FKR games, lyric games, and so on. If you want to design a Star Wars game and you aren't sure about how to handle the Force, or if you're going to be running a Call and/or Trail of Cthulhu and are crafting a mystery for your investigators, or you're making a random mutation table for a Mothership adventure you're writing, then there's likely something in this post that you should be thinking about. It just might never have occurred to you before because you're only ever thinking of one possible definition out of many.

8 Opinions about Spider-Man

Per the demands of Prismatic Wasteland, I have to write a blog post about Spider-Man. So what do I say about Spider-Man that hasn't already been said?

I decided my best bet would be to just create a shitty clickbait post with no real substance and lots of bad takes.

A Primer on Star Wars RPGs

If you've received a link to this article, you may have just asked the question, "what's the deal with Star Wars RPGs?" The first part of this post is a succinct overview of all the major (and some minor) options out there which cover this need.

I decided to write this because in the last two weeks, I've seen at least 4 Reddit posts and a couple Discord messages where people asked that very question, and I get tired of explaining it. So if you see someone asking that question, link them to this article.

Traits of the Mythic Underworld

The "Mythic Underworld" is a term popular in the OSR that was (probably) coined by Trent Smith and then popularized through an essay by Jason Cone in Philotomy's Musings. Cone argued that the rules of OD&D can be interpreted to suggest that the "dungeons" that adventurers delve into aren't really to be understood as real, logical spaces created by normal people or natural processes. Rather, they're more like a surreal, dreamlike, and hostile realm that runs on its own twisted logic, which might be inconsistent. It gives the referee some leeway to make a contrived, game-y, "funhouse" dungeon instead of stressing about accuracy or rationality.

Much of what Cone describes are just traits of megadungeons, or even simply dungeons in general. Things like, "non-linear pathways" and "lots of connections between levels" aren't really mythic, they're just good level design. So, extracting from his original writings on the matter, here are the traits he identifies that are actually mythic (in my view):

1. It's so large it might have infinite levels.
2. The deeper you go, the more dangerous it is.
3. Its layout may change over time.
4. Doors are locked/stuck for PCs by default, but automatically swing open for monsters.
5. Related, it is shrouded in darkness, but all monsters have infravision.
• It should be noted that when a monster is persuaded to join the party, they lose these two privileges! This strongly suggests that the space itself is intentionally rewriting its own rules to oppose the players.
6. Torches and whatnot might be randomly blown out by a strong gust of wind, despite the fact that you're deep underground in, like, a tomb or something.

And... that's it. I always thought this idea was much cooler in theory than in reality. I agree with Cone that this is really the only reasonable way to interpret the rules, but I always wanted there to be more. So I've compiled some:

1. Party incurs fatigue/stress the longer they spend in the dungeon (taken from Basic D&D).
2. Rations spoil once you enter the dungeon (BECMI D&D, thanks to ktrey from d4caltrops.com)
3. When the players open treasure, monsters might pop out of the walls, generated from thin air (taken from the board game HeroQuest).
4. Monsters don't exist until the players first observe them. Thus, exploration should be slow and methodical or else the players will too quickly surround themselves in monsters (also taken from HeroQuest).
5. The monsters cannot set off traps (HeroQuest again but I wonder if this might be encoded in D&D somewhere in its history).
6. The scenery and room features attack you (countless haunted house media, but in this case I was inspired by the 2006 movie Monster House).
7. Stairs turn into ramps, doors start randomizing where they lead to, hallways become endless, secret doors appear and then disappear (no, I don't mean they become hidden again. I mean they stop existing), etc. (more haunted house shenanigans).
8. Weird M.C. Escher gravity rules.
9. Advanced Darkness.
10. Every hall keeps leading back into the same room no matter what, and it's full of horrible doppelgangers (the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks).
11. Doors to rooms that would overlap each other, doors into rather thin walls, windows to the outside world in an interior room, doors/windows/entrances moving which side of the room they’re on, etc. (the Overlook Hotel from The Shining).

It's a start. Now of course, I don't necessarily advocate only using the Mythic Underworld. I quite enjoy "reasonable," well thought-out dungeons. But if you're going to make a Lynchian funhouse, then you should commit. In the Mythic Underworld, the dungeon is a living organism and the PCs are an infection. It has its own natural immune system that wants to drive them out. For the PCs to feel as though they're fighting the environment itself, I think it needs to put up a better fight.

-Dwiz

How to Make Combat Spicy

I have bigger, better articles in the works but I noticed my output has slowed down, so back into the vaults I go. I've dug up this list from many years ago and adapted it. This was inspired by a recent claim I made that there's such a thing as "system-agnostic combat encounter design" that you can and should learn, which many people were resistant to. Here was the original pitch I wrote for this:

I've talked to many people who think that combat in 5E isn’t really fun. There are many arguments for this, some of which are perfectly valid and some of which just come down to subjectivity, but by far the most common argument is this: they say that because it removed so many mechanical elements from the process (e.g. flanking mechanics, using miniatures and grids by default, having to take feats and shit to move in conjunction with an attack, having to spend actions on drawing weapons and reloading crossbows and shit, no full-round attacks, etc.) that there aren’t enough options in combat to keep it interesting. And they say that, because of this, every combat is just, “I make a basic attack. ...I hit. …alright I attack again. ...I hit. ...alright I attack again. ...I missed" for like 10 rounds.

But I can’t say that I agree. My own group doesn’t have this problem and it’s not like we're working that hard to avoid it, either. No, it doesn't have a bunch of "cool power buttons" to press like 3.5E and 4E. But you still can do all sorts of creative things as long as you think of something useful and cool other than “basic attack,” and the DM thinks they can run with it.

The goal of 4E D&D was to have the rules do all the heavy-lifting for you. It has intrinsic tactical depth, but the effort they put into that came at the expense of pretty much everything else. 5E asks you to put in some extra work if you want to have an action-oriented adventure, but it does so because it's also granting you the freedom of tactical infinity.

To put it shortly, are you really all that surprised that your combat hasn't been fun when you keep throwing your players against 5 regular goblins in a blank, flat room with no secondary goals or complications to the situation? Doesn't it feel a little silly to blame the rules when that ends up being a boring experience?

Of course, I know you believe me. You know what I'm talking about. There've been many other writers who've developed some theory as to what makes this work. Chris McDowall has "Information, Choice, Impact." Patrick Stuart has "Game vs Threat" (found in his book Silent Titans. [EDIT: I've decided to just splice the page in at the bottom of this post since it was bugging me that I couldn't find anything about it on his blog]). The Monsters Know What They're Doing has made a career of their theory. Runehammer has a great series on "Room Design" that covers what I'm talking about. 4th Edition D&D made use of one of my favorite game design concepts innovated by DOOM: "Orthogonal Unit Differentiation" (watch that video, it rocks). I even once claimed that there are literally only two enemies you ever need (which is a lie, but a good lie).

But this was my own effort from years ago that I think holds up pretty well. It's just a list. Not a theory or a formula, just a list of elements to include.

Subterranean Thoughts

So I recently took greater notice that many of my favorite gaming writers will post little snippets of what they've been working on to their blog. Even if it's incomplete, it's still a solid preview, can build hype, and is probably somewhat usable on its own. So why don't I try that?

My home campaign setting is called Underworld, and is all about that sweet, dank Underdark, baby. When I first started working on it, I spent a long time thinking about how to bring more out of the Underdark experience in D&D. How much depth would need to be added in order for that one trope to carry an entire campaign? And I like thinking in terms of rules and mechanics at least as much as lore, when it comes to worldbuilding and reinforcing themes.

The following materials were mostly written around 2016 and 2017 but I was heavily sidetracked by worldbuilding and "higher level" game design. Oh, and getting a bachelor's degree. But I consider all of this to be stuff that I one day will return to and do justice, because it's important (in fact, I made a couple edits as I copy/pasted it here). I anticipate eventually either putting this stuff into a Brave supplement that'll have rules, systems, and tables for Underworld stuff, or I might just compile and publish my setting outright and put this stuff there instead. Contained within the following thoughts are some implied setting assumptions that may not be true for the "default, vanilla" Underdark, but you'll still enjoy it. Plus, I included lots of great pictures you'll want to expand.

And yes, the release of Veins of the Earth did stifle me a bit. But while that book is indeed excellent, I also think you'll agree that much of what follows builds onto it quite nicely and covers things it doesn't address.

A Thorough Look at Skill Challenges (Part 1: the Rules)

Who's ready for another stupidly long post? That's the spirit!

The "Skill Challenge" is an interesting type of generalist gameplay procedure that's not a core experience of many games, but which often comes recommended as a good level design trick for all sorts of reasons. Here's kind of a funny game you can play: try asking a question on any RPG thread or forum or Discord community about "how would you adjudicate so-and-so challenge?" and see how long it takes for someone to recommend using a Skill Challenge (SC).

But even though there are so many people eager to recommend them, I have more... complicated feelings about them. So maybe it's worth taking some time to explore their design in a more dispassionate, neutral fashion.

Another reason I thought this could be of some value to write out is that, to my surprise, we cannot all agree on what precisely a Skill Challenge even is! Yes, individual variations are actually very common, and some of the seemingly-minor changes people make have a huge impact on the end result.

I'm splitting this post into two parts. Here in Part 1, I'm comparing and contrasting different versions of the SC, with occasional observations about them beyond just stating the rules. Once we've covered every major iteration of the SC that I can find, as well as a few similar systems from other sources, in Part 2 I'm gunna do a deeper analysis of the pros and cons of this system and its greater role in game design. Expect that article in a couple days.

I hope you like mechanics, because these two posts are detailed. There are tons and tons of "introduction to Skill Challenges" articles and videos out there if you want something quick. But this here is for the game design nuts. Even with me already splitting it in two, you'll still probably want to split this first part up into a few separate reading sessions.

Happy Birthday Knight at the Opera: A Blog Retrospective

I started this blog two years ago. At that point, many people were already saying that the OSR / DIY D&D blogosphere was dying out, but they were probably being unnecessarily bleak. Still though, I was throwing my hat into a competitive ring with a small, small audience. Attention is hard to grab, so if you aren't a Grognardia or a Jeff Rients or maybe a Patrick Stuart then your chances of catching people's eye is pretty small.

Considering all that, this blog has done much better than I ever anticipated. It's not huge or anything but waking up to see your post has gotten 1000+ views overnight is pretty damn cool. That's 1000+ people who chose to read my nonsense in their cubicle on a Monday morning over a cup of coffee instead of doing something productive. That feels pretty good.

So for this blog's 2 year anniversary (as well as a celebration of my favorite holiday, Labor Day), I wanted to reflect and share wisdom. This post will have 3 parts: 1) How to Start a Blog, 2) Things I've Learned About Successful Blogging, and 3) a Celebration of This Blog's Greatest Posts and Products.

Not All Crunch Is the Same

A lot of people put all games on a simple spectrum of "less crunch" to "more crunch," where the amount of crunchiness is measured roughly by "the number of discrete rules you can point to in the game." The more rules a game has, the crunchier it is, and that's that. While it is good to have an idea of whether you're the kind of gamer who generally prefers more crunch or less crunch, I see a lot of shallow and misleading discussions happen where people are turned away from games they may have otherwise quite enjoyed. And that tends to happen because the game was reduced down to "too much crunch" when that's just a dishonest way to represent what it's actually like.

I am definitely guilty of this, in case anyone wants to call me out.

Look, there are lots of ways in which a game can be made complicated. Rules can play many roles. The devil is in the details. It is genuinely worth it to sometimes take a moment to look under the hood and see what kinds of rules are in the game before dismissing it.

Some games have lots of rules but they're fairly intuitive (once you know how spellcasting works in Ars Magica you can start using it quite naturally). Some games have relatively few rules but they are difficult to master. Some games have lots of rules but they're all built using the same core ingredients, so once you learn the "Rosetta Stone" mechanic then everything else falls into place (most universal systems rely on this, like Savage Worlds or FATE. I would argue D&D 5E does it pretty well. It's very "rulings over rules" friendly). Some games have a ton of rules that are all disconnected and are each a subsystem that you have to learn separately and it's a pain in the ass (sigh... Fantasy Craft).

However, I want to put the spotlight on very specific types of mechanics that, yes, are all more rules than you would ordinarily need if you were just running something like B/X D&D, but aren't necessarily all equal in how much they truly complicate or restrict the game.

On Dungeon Size

In the most recent Questing Beast Q&A he and his guests gave their thoughts of "ideal dungeon size" and it got me thinking. Here's a link to the part of the video where they discuss it. After some consideration, I want to propose 4 basic size classes of dungeon, divided partially by number of rooms but, more importantly, by the effect they have on the core gameplay loop of your campaign.

An Incomplete History of Mazes in RPGs

Mazes and labyrinths are a staple of fantasy fiction, so it makes sense that you might want to see one in D&D. In many ways, the Greek Labyrinth was the original dungeon, so it seems like a perfect fit, right? Except that it's notoriously tricky to run a maze in D&D without it sucking, and there's no standardized solution. So in this article, I'm going to review a list of instances I've found in various gaming products where a unique attempt was made and then explain their method. If you've never personally encountered this problem before, it may not be obvious what's so difficult about it. But I bet that once you start seeing some of the following examples, you'll begin to understand.

This will ultimately lead to, at some point in the future, a set of rules I've made based on what I've learned. I'll include those in my RPG Brave when it's released, but whenever I make a first draft I'll probably post it on my blog as a standalone procedure. If you find any other unique takes on mazes in RPGs I'd love to read them, but this isn't meant to be exhaustive.

Elves Part 3: Elf Subraces

Artist credit: Steve Prescott

I didn't expect to write even one of these articles, let alone 3. Well, you can't have elves without elf-types, so here are my versions of the three classic elf subraces (High, Dark, Wood) for Underworld. Please see the last post of this series here. I'm basically writing down every solid idea I've had so far, but the more I write, the more I feel like this trichotomy will inevitably be deconstructed. I began charting factions and races in my setting and started expanding the list exponentially, so each region of the world would have a good variety of unique societies. And so... just one type of High Elf, Dark Elf, and Wood Elf stopped being sufficient. I'll instead likely create a matrix of two axes: light to dark (with a neutral zone in the middle) and Seelie to Unseelie (with a neutral zone in the middle), creating 9 basic types of elf. Except that, obviously, there are more elf societies than that. Hoo boy, I've really gone down the worldbuilding rabbit hole. But in any case, I can right now offer up "the classic three," good for most elf purposes.