Einsol's Razor

Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (D&D 5E) is a heroic fantasy tabletop roleplaying game published by Wizards of the Coast. Released in 2014, it is the edition that brought D&D from a niche hobby into mainstream pop culture - showing up in TV shows, podcasts, and actual-play streams, and introducing millions of new players to the hobby for the first time. 5E was designed after a massive public playtest ("D&D Next") with the explicit goal of being approachable to newcomers while still satisfying veteran players. The Basic Rules are free, and a game can start with nothing more than those rules, some friends, and a set of dice (or a digital dice roller app). In 2024 the core rules received a significant revision, now commonly referred to as Dungeons & Dragons 5.5E (2024). Both versions are fully compatible and most groups mix material freely. The system it directly evolved from is Dungeons & Dragons 4E (2008) Description In D&D 5E, players create fantasy adventurers (a half-orc barbarian, an elven wizard, a tiefling rogue) and one player takes on the role of the Dungeon Master (DM). The DM builds and describes the world, voices the non-player characters (NPCs), controls the monsters, and acts as both the lead storyteller and the rules referee. There is no board. The game is a conversation: the DM describes a scene, the players say what their characters do, and the dice decide what happens when the outcome is uncertain. A typical session runs three to four hours with a group of three to six players plus the DM. The game describes itself as resting on "Three Pillars": Combat, Exploration, and Social Interaction. A single session might include all three, from tracking a monster through the wilderness and negotiating with a shady merchant to fighting a troll at the entrance to a cave. Combat is the most mechanically detailed of the three and tends to take up the largest share of table time, though groups are free to lean as hard into roleplaying or exploration as they like. The default assumption is a high-fantasy world filled with magic, monsters, and ancient ruins. The flagship published setting is the Forgotten Realms, but Wizards of the Coast has released adventures across a range of worlds, and many DMs create their own. The game does not ship a single canon story. Every table's story is different, shaped by what the players do. 5E is designed to be approachable. The core philosophy is "rulings over rules," meaning that when something comes up that the rules do not explicitly cover, the DM is encouraged to make a quick call and keep the game moving rather than stopping to look things up. The rules reward creativity and improvisation, and the system explicitly expects that no one at the table has memorized the entire rulebook. That said, the DM carries most of the preparation work between sessions: building encounters, preparing maps, and keeping the story moving. Players can show up with nothing but their character sheet and a set of dice.

Dungeons & Dragons 5.5E (commonly called the "2024 rules" or "D&D 2024") is the revised and updated version of the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition tabletop roleplaying game, published by Wizards of the Coast. Released across three core rulebooks throughout 2024 and early 2025, it is not a new edition. It is the same game, refined. The revision was driven by a decade of player feedback and data on how tables actually run 5E, and it shipped to coincide with the game's 50th anniversary. The three revised core books are the Player's Handbook (September 2024), the Dungeon Master's Guide (November 2024), and the Monster Manual (February 2025). All three are reorganized, reworded for clarity, and mechanically updated. Rather than replacing 5th Edition with a "6th Edition," 5.5E expands and tightens the existing framework while maintaining backwards compatibility with every 5E adventure module, sourcebook, and campaign setting published since 2014. If you are new to D&D entirely, start with the Dungeons & Dragons 5e (2014) entry for a full explanation of how the game works. Everything described there still applies here. This entry covers what 5.5E specifically changed. Description D&D 5.5E plays identically to 5th Edition at the table. Players create adventurers, one player takes on the role of the Dungeon Master (DM), and the group tells a collaborative story driven by a twenty-sided die (d20) and the DM's rulings. The core loop, the "Three Pillars" of Combat, Exploration, and Social Interaction, and the fundamental mechanics (Advantage and Disadvantage, Bounded Accuracy, the Proficiency Bonus, the rest system) all carry over unchanged. What the 2024 revision addresses is the rough edges that a decade of play exposed. Martial classes (Fighters, Barbarians, Monks, Rogues) now have more tactical options in combat instead of repeating the same basic attack every turn. Spellcasting classes have been rebalanced to reduce the gap between low-level and high-level power. Rules that were famously unclear or frequently house-ruled (grappling, crafting, surprise, two-weapon fighting) have been rewritten. The Dungeon Master's Guide, long criticized as poorly organized, has been restructured into a book that new DMs can actually learn from rather than only reference. The result is a game that feels the same at the table but runs more smoothly. Groups that have been playing 5E for years will notice the quality-of-life improvements. Groups starting fresh will simply have a cleaner ruleset from day one. Both 2014 and 2024 material can be used at the same table without conversion, though the newer rules are recommended for new characters.

Daggerheart is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game published by Darrington Press, an imprint of Critical Role Productions. The game was released in 2025. Description Daggerheart is a story-docused role-playing game system, where the rules direct players to think narratively and not just mechanically. The game uses a system called Duality Dice, where players roll two twelve-sided dice. One for Hope and one for Fear. In addition to determining whether the character achieves success or fails at the action they are trying to perform, it also generates a helpful Hope resource for the player, or a challenging Fear resource for the game master (GM). Lead designer Spenser Starke explained that there is "also no initiative in Daggerheart". It functions very much like a Forged in the Dark or a Powered By The Apocalypse game, where the GM is making moves on certain dice rolls and we're passing play back and forth as a conversation. It all flows together in a way that supports the storytelling-first direction that Critical Role has really embraced over the last decade". The game features 279 supplemental cards to track player abilities and characteristics. Darrington Press also launched several digital resources, including an online custom card creator.

CY_BORG is a cyberpunk tabletop RPG created by Christian Sahlén and Johan Nohr of Stockholm Kartell, published by Free League Publishing in 2022 following a November 2021 Kickstarter. It's a direct spin-off of MÖRK BORG, Pelle Nilsson and Nohr's doom-metal-flavored apocalyptic fantasy game from 2020, swapping that game's black-metal dark fantasy for a noise, industrial, and underground-hip-hop-inspired vision of cyberpunk - and it's fully compatible with MÖRK BORG's own rules and content. Where MÖRK BORG is often pitched as a doom metal album in RPG form, CY_BORG plays the same trick with a different genre, trading gothic dread for corporate-hellscape rage. Description Playing CY_BORG means playing one of six ready-made classes - the Forsaken Gang-Goon, Shunned Nanomancer, Renegade Cyberslasher, Burned Hacker, Orphaned Gearhead, or Discharged Corp Killer - dropped into the sprawling megacity of Cy, a world of warring corporations, gangs, cults, and an alien nanotech infestation that keeps mutating everything it touches.  Character creation is quick and dirty, mostly determined by dice rolls across tables for abilities, gear, quirks, and even who a character owes money to, staying true to MÖRK BORG's rules-light, rulings-before-rules design philosophy. Sessions tend to run as short, dangerous jobs - the included introductory heist, Lucky Flight Takedown, has players scope out and hit a casino - rather than long-form dungeon delving, and death comes easily enough that a fresh, disposable punk is always just a few dice rolls away.

At Session Zero Heroes we believe in the power of storytelling through tabletop roleplaying games and use a wide variety of systems to create these stories which we share through the podcast medium. From hilarious to emotional our stories and themes come in all shapes and sizes and help us to create amazing series and one-shots for your listening pleasure! Our first show: Benders & Brews: An Avatar Legends Actual Play is the one that started it all! In this series, we jump into the world of Avatar the Last Airbender as a group of teens fight back against rival tea shops and the occasional run-in with pirates and the Fire Nation in order to save their own tea shop: The Blissful Brew. Our other, a Dungeons & Dragons series called Criminals of Isla Numus where a group of characters are thrown into a deity's pocket dimension with the goal of making 1,000,000 gold in the span of a year’s time. Will they be able to overcome a variety of obstacles and struggles and accomplish their task? Links sessionzeroheroes.com - Official website youtube.com - Youtube channel discord.gg - Discord server

Tales Unrolled is a new actual play series helmed by Luis Carazo, Christian Navarro, Jack Cummins and the team at Sonoro. The series will be available both as an audio-only podcast and as a video series on YouTube. It is set in a world inspired by the rich mythologies, aesthetics, history, and cultures of our collective upbringings. Our world is unique, but our stories are universal, and we welcome both new and old fans of actual play to our proverbial table. Links youtube.com  - Youtube channel spotify.com  - Spotify feed patreon.com  - Patreon page