I recently played Dungeons & Dragons for the first time ever, and it sure was fun. We talk about that and much more on this week’s Kotaku Splitscreen.

Sometimes, people create horrible and unconscionable things all in the name of fantasy.

When members of our Dungeons and Dragons group have a birthday, we play a one-off game in their system of choice, usually with an accompanying gimmick. Last time we had a birthday, we played as an all bard party. This time, our birthday boy wanted to combine both of his role playing group into one giant one. We needed…

“What Dungeons and Dragons class should I play?” is the kind of question you could answer with a cursory quiz, but that would be a mistake. You owe it to yourself—and to your D&D dungeon master—to think holistically about character class, maybe the most important choice you’ll make in a D&D game. Picking the right…

For four decades, players have dutifully sacrificed a large portion of their Dungeons & Dragons games to take turns hitting a goblin with a broadsword. It’s time for us to release ourselves from the thousands of collective hours we’ve spent on D&D’s most tedious chore. Let’s kill off the goblin fight—or at least make…

Your bread-and-butter Dungeons & Dragons party won’t include a manticore, a gargoyle, a hyena or a sentient fungi, but maybe it should. One D&D player spent a year and a half converting every single creature in the D&D Monster Manual into playable characters, and now players can live out their dreams of being a great…

A few months ago, I proposed a wild idea: Dungeons & Dragons—except you cook what you kill. After a little tinkering, I’m happy to report that my mechanics for cooking in D&D are now widely available.

For nearly a decade, there hasn’t been more than a vestige of a black society in the official world of Dungeons & Dragons. There have been black people, but no black civilizations except for a relatively small group of survivors of a catastrophe and locals living under colonists’ control. Back in 2008, D&D’s…

Decades of D&D fans repeating the old adage “Friends don’t let friends play half-orcs” may have had some tangible effects. Yesterday, FiveThirtyEight published data on the most D&D popular classes and races and, well, half-orcs only make up about five percent of all D&D characters played between August 15 and…

Last week, Wizards of the Coast reimagined their classic horror game Betrayal at House on the Hill in a Dungeons & Dragons high fantasy setting. Back in 2004, Betrayal captured the curiosity and fear that comes with crawling through a haunted mansion with mechanics that brilliantly mirrored its horror theme. Slowly…

Divinity: Original Sin 2 has a mode that lets players design their own Dungeons & Dragons-esque adventure inside the role-playing game, and in case you were wondering what kind of dweeb would port their homebrew D&D game into DoS: 2, the answer is me. My experiment was instructive and, I think, says a lot about the…

Dungeons & Dragons’ selling point is that is lets players be and do things they’ve always dreamed of. Dinosaur racing has never been one of those things for me, but if it is for you, D&D’s newest adventure, which launched today, delivers on that very specific fantasy.

So, uh, I’ve been pretty fixated on the idea of a dungeon-crawl-slash-cooking show—a Dungeons & Dragons game where you kill what you eat. A few questionably-spent days of vacation after spawning this ludicrous idea, I found a way to mod Dungeons & Dragons to accommodate my cooking fantasies. And, surprisingly, it…

As we sat together at Gen Con in Indianapolis this weekend talking Dungeons & Dragons, the game’s lead rules developer Jeremy Crawford motioned towards a copy of the Player’s Handbook resting on the table between us. “I wasn’t about to have this book go out and not acknowledge that people like me exist,” he said.

Dungeons & Dragons’ lead rules designer Jeremy Crawford has a tough job. To keep the game in top form, he’s got to make sure its exhaustive ruleset walks that fine line between combat and role-play, thoroughness and accessibility, firmness and flexibility. Along the way, he’s come up with some good tips on getting in…

A bloodthirsty janitor, Colonel Mustard, Death, a God-fearing cleric and a dabbing teen had one thing in common at Gen Con last weekend: they were among over a hundred Level 1 characters whom a sadistic dungeon master killed in the span of two hours.

When everything in the physical world is getting uploaded onto some great supercomputer in space, you will find me hiding somewhere dark, clinging to my Dungeons & Dragons character sheets. Yes, that’s how much I love playing D&D the traditional way: real dice, real paper and real damn pencils. But Dungeons & Dragons’…

Enter the tavern. Bite the plot hook. Go on your righteous journey. Kill the monsters. Fight the boss. Free the town. Rinse, repeat, and rejoice in those experience points. There you have it: the life of a lawful good Dungeons & Dragons character.