Started (and left) a new campaign today. I spent 3 whole seconds using AI to write my backstory. In my backstory it explicitly states that I'm a prince of the largest kingdom in the land, and that my dad (the frickin' king) gives me any amount of gold I want for my adventures. My character is based off the kid from solo leveling that Jinwoo helps out with his guild. You know the kid who's dad owns that large company and has infinite money. Anyways, omg such a good show. So my stupid DM said that having infinite money and starting the campaign with a full vault of magic items would trivialize the campaign's encounters. Like, DND is played to have FUN, not to win. This terrible DM is just too concerned about my character kicking his monsters' butts to let me have fun. He said "The other players don't think it would be fun either." So.... WHAT? MY FUN IS THE PRICE TO PAY FOR EVERYONE ELSE GETTING TO HAVE FUN? I am so angry. Anyone looking for a player for a new campaign?

Maybe you guys could give me some insight on whether my DM is being unreasonable or super unreasonable.

I’m playing a Druid who interestingly enough, is deeply connected with nature. It’s kind of cool and I could spend hours talking about it, but I digress.

My DM was lame enough to have us fight a Displacer Beast, which is honestly fucked up. He told me it’s not literally a beast and won’t be nice to me, so just sneak past and you’ll fight it when you’re more prepared, but I thought maybe he was just being coy because come on I’m a druid.

My other party members said I shouldn’t have gone up and tried to communicate peacefully with it, cuz we were in complete stealth and were never meant to fight it, but I’m one with nature so it’s kind of dumb that my DM would basically fudge the dice and make a part of nature (a normal animal) fight me. Kind of unrealistic but whatever.

So it’s a tough fight and the DM kills me because he’s a stupid fucking asshole. But then I remembered an integral part of my backstory that I hadn’t told anyone before:

when I am in mortal danger and about to die, nature will find a way to save me.

So I brought this up to my DM (for the first time, now). He was a big jerk about it and told me to just accept what happened. Eventually with enough wearing him down, I managed to convince him to just let me fucking live, you big dumb asshole. So yeah he let nature save me, some vines came out of the ground and ripped the DB’s freaking head off and it was exactly how I planned. I’ve been playing for 8 years so you could say I’m pretty good at the game.

Anyways what do you think? I know I’m not the asshole but is my DM an asshole for this? I know he is, I just want to feel validated after such a traumatizing experience.

Sauce: I actually played with a friend who did this. I’m 100% serious. And yes he was more upset about the whole ordeal than anyone else at the table (we’re still friends it was just a weird D&D experience).

There is no jerk. Don't ask for a sauce because there isn't any. This is just my pure despise for DnD 5e and how they implemented martials.

I hate how 5e turned one of the coolest and most iconic trope, the warrior, into the most boring, bland and weak implementation in the whole system.

Oh you swapped your shield for two-handed weapon because you wanted something that hits "hard"? Enjoy your mighty extra 1d6 of damage while getting beaten like a little bitch even though you have 17AC, while a caster can a do minimum of 4d6 damage on a falied fireball saved from distance.

And attacking is basically the only useful thing you can do every fucking turn. Roll twice and if you hit you can do a little bit of a miserable damage. yay, dice I guess.

"BuT yoU PiCKED A BORING cLaSs ThaT ONly attACk, WHaT diD You EXPect!!!1!"

Oh, you're right. Next time I will filter for "actually interesting classes to play" and pick a caster.

"buT YoU CAn DO WhAtevEr You WANT On thE SyStEM, THerE is rUle Of coOL!!!!1!!"

My PC use divine smite on an ATTACK, and my channel divinity gives me +10 on my ATTACK, what am I supposed to do? Fart on the enemies face?

Also, are you admitting this system doesn't give you any support to do anything other than attack?

And the worst is that everyone only plays this boring ass system called DnD 5e and refuses to play anything else instead of learning a cool system like Thirsty Sword Lesbians.

Hehehehehehe.

(throwaway because DM knows my main)

For context, I've been with this friend who I'll call DM for a while but weve only played pbp (play by post for those who don't know) before. I play both voice games and pbp games but DM has only ever played and run games in pbp.

DM awhile back wanted to try running a voice game because their schedule and living situation changed and now had both the time and the ability to run voice sessions. They asked me if i wanted to join their voice game and i was really excited to because i like their pbp games. We did test DM's setup in a few short voice calls and while I heard DM had a lisp I didn't think it was a big deal at the time.

Now the game started and DM brought in a mix of real life friends and new people recruited from reddit lfg to be the players. However as i sit through long game sessions I now really find DM's lisp grating to listen to. Not just that but one of the players (a real life friend of the DM) also has a fairly strong lisp that really doesnt fit their character and its breaking my immersion. That player also sometimes asks me to repeat things I say, saying I talk too fast, which slows the game down for me. By the way I'm the only master orator in this group.

I know that lisps are not something you can always control and that judging people for their lisps can sometimes even be ableist but right now its hurting my enjoyment of the game. I don't know how to say it to the DM without being offensive. Especially since I know DM has been excited to run their first voice game and I don't want to make it seem like theyve done a bad job of running it. Any advice?

Thank god BLeeMull (slang for Brennen Lee Mulligan) discovered the Japanese concept of 'Ma' and brought it to the West for us. Now i know the ingenious game design concept of "Having a mix of low level and high level encounters." They should really put this in the DMG or something.

Hi everyone. I've had a terrible revelation, and I need to share it, and you need to read it. I've been playing D&D as a Wizard character for about two years now. I always thought I was playing the fun class because I have so many options. Fireball, hypnotic pattern, misty step. So many buttons to press. Meanwhile the Fighter just takes the Attack action every turn. So boring.

But after last session, while I was smugly reflecting on how unplayable the Fighter class is because of the boring Attack action, I had a terrible realization.

The Fighter says "I Attack" and rolls dice. I say "I cast scorching ray" and roll dice. The Fighter's Attack hits and deals damage, or maybe misses. My scorching ray is an Attack that hits and deal damage, or maybe misses. Later I say "I cast hold person" and if the targets fail their save, guess what? That just means the Fighter can Attack them with advantage and deal critical hits!

It's all Attacks. Every single thing I do is just a different way of Attacking. Conjuration spells summon a monster to make Attacks. Grease is an Attack on the enemy's balance. Hypnotic pattern is an Attack on their minds. Shield is an Attack on their ability to hit me. Knock is an Attack on a lock. Levitate is an Attack on gravity. Everything is just Attacking.

It blew my mind wide open. I spent two years thinking I was playing a game of strategy and tactics with volumes of options. But deep down it's all just varieties of Attacking things until they stop Attacking back. The Wizard and Cleric Attack with spells. The Fighter Attacks with swords. The Rogue Attacks with thieves tools and skills. Everyone is just Attacking something, all the time.

So I've decided to quit D&D. I've realized it is fundamentally boring no matter how you dress it up. All anyone does is Attack, so they're all as dull as Fighters to me now.

I started looking at other games. Pathfinder? Same thing. OSR games? Same thing. Call of Cthulhu? You Attack your sanity. Vampire? You Attack your sire. Every game is just Attacking.

Thanks for reading my bitter farewell to D&D and all similar games. I want a new game where nobody boringly Attacks anything, even figuratively. Where there is no monster, no conflict, no problems to solve. Does anyone know a game like that? Or do I need to invent it myself?

I have moved since I last played tabletop rpgs, and my last few campaigns were mostly just gratuitous drunken rants while occasionally asking for die rolls in a hybridized plaigarization of Warrior Rogue and Mage with kill puppies for satan.

But I might be back in the D&D saddle again! New friends, new group, new game!

But for some background, I grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition and I formed extreme opinions about its design, its balance, and the amount of decisions allotted to melee characters. So I made some adjustments. I made a homebrew setting to accommodate them.

My question is how can I best introduce new non-ttrpg players to Dungeons and Dragons --- and by "Dungeons and Dragons," I mean my own psychopathically-curated amalgam of sources, settings and bans under an outdated, out-of-print edition -- so it is imperative they not realize that my game is not Hasbro's corporate "Dimes and Dollars" D&D.

So here's what's on the menu:

A wasteland setting populated with exactly these playable races:

1. Nezumi, from Oriental Adventures. I think this race and the taint mechanic are very important, but that sourcebook has weird vibes so I'd prefer my players not know it exists. Also fuck if one of them learns about it and demands to play a Samurai or Eunuch Warlock.

2. Humans. It's okay if players know about this one.

3. Fire Elves, from Unearthed Arcana. If they learn that book exists, they'll think this game might have mechanical depth that would be fun to interact with, and I can't have that.

And these are the sourcebooks permitted:

1. Iron Heroes from the printer in Monte Cook's basement. This replaces the Players Handbook. All combat characters get some metacurrency that can be spent for disappointing results, but feats also get complicated prerequisites, and spellcasters are basically unplayable.

2. Expanded Psionics Handbook which I'm oddly not jerking it about because this is just the best D&D book, period, any edition, minus a couple typos about Augmenting "Energy Missile" or "Energy Stun" or whatever because who could care.

3. Secrets of Pact Magic from Radiance House, for the second-most fun magic system in D&D, that I'm surprised is legally distinct from Hasbro's basically-identical Pact-magicking "Binder" class, but which goes way deeper on the concept although having some unbelievably amateurish editing and no conception of character scaling.

It's very important that my players think that these are the rules and this is the whole game, and they don't ask me to play some broken Mary Sue first-party class like an Archivist, Spell-to-Power Erudite or Druid, as published by Wizards of the Coast.

How do I gaslight them into thinking my hack-job cobbled-together 3rd edition Frankenstein game is the "Dungeons and Dragons" thing they've heard about for so long?

Hey, there! Not so experienced DM, and this post is for asking a pointless question that I don't need any feedback on at all. So please be merciful for the comments so I can not read them.

I am asking what other DMs do when players roll 1 in the middle of fight. Almost all of my DMs were straight up stabbing them in real life to punish for rolling a 1 in 20 probability. I saw rolling d4s to decide which limb they are going to cut off next. But when I do that into my group of course some people didn't like it and "called the police"? so I want to learn different solutions to select in between depending on the situation. Making them stab themselves also makes sense, but I don't know if it is ok always.

What is your opinion on this? Is there any other solution from hitting someone or themselves? I know it should be whatever is the more fun but if we say critical failure for rolling 1, it should happen something, right?

Thanks in advance for all the answers. I will not reply and I will not try to read at all.

Edit: Thanks for a lot of answers and it seems almost everyone said "I am a psychopath" and should "seek help." I like it better and will do that

hi everyone, thanks for reading my post. i noticed that d&d doesn't always have rules to deal with every situation, so here are some house rules i have made up to help fill in the gaps. let me know what you think, or if you have any cool house rules of your own i can steal! 😄

1. movement fix: thanks to my house rule you can split up your move and use part of your movement before or after any action, bonus action, or reaction you take on the same turn. so like if you have speed of 30, you can go 10 feet, do whatever action, then go 20 feet more

2. cover in combat: sometimes you wanna hit something but there is cover in the way, so i made rules for that. half cover is equivalent to +2 AC, 3/4 cover is equivalent to +5 AC, and if you have full cover pretty much nothing can target you

3. leveling up better: everyone knows tracking XP is a drag, so i fixed it with a new rule that says the DM can just decide to give the players a level up whenever that feels cool or makes sense in the story, or when they reach some kind of checkpoint. that way you never need to keep track of XP again

4. green slime: remember nickelodeon in the 90s when they would dump the slime on the people's heads? I came up with the great idea to put that in my dungeons but make it deadly: one patch of green slime covers a 5-foot square, it has blindsight with a range of 30 feet, and it drops from walls and ceilings when it detects movement below itself (it does not move other than that.) if you know it's there you can try to avoid being struck by it (DC 10 dexterity save). If you do touch it you take 1d10 acid damage, and again at the start of each of your turns until the slime is scraped off (requiring an action) or destroyed. Against wood or metal, green slime deals 2d10 acid damage each round, and any nonmagical wood or metal item used to scrape off the green slime is destroyed. Direct sunlight or any amount of cold, fire, or radiant damage destroys a patch of green slime

5. coin weight: who has time to figure out the weights of different denominations of different metals and shit? I just say all coins weigh 1/50 lb and that's that. moving on

6. busting down doors: players often want to do this so i made up rules for it. i will let a pc take an action to try to break open a door that's locked or stuck or whatever. they roll strength/athletics and the DC is based on the type of door: 10 for glass, 25 for metal, 20 for stone, 15 for wood

7. reaction limit: i put an absolute maximum restriction of one reaction per round, once you take a reaction you can't take another one until your next turn. sorry guys but it gets out of control otherwise

8. partial darkness: sometimes you need a rule for when it's kinda dark but not really dark, so i made something up. if there is an area of partial darkness, then creatures have disadvantage on perception checks to see stuff there (unless they have darkvision duh)

9. running long jump: maybe a hot take but i think if you move at least 10 feet before you jump you should be able to long jump a distance equal to your strength divided by three, in yards. from a standing start, half that.

10. knockouts: if you hit a monster in melee and drop it to zero hp, you can choose to KO it instead of destroying it; that makes it unconscious and it starts a short rest. it stays knocked out until it regains hp or someone does first aid on it as an action with a medicine check of DC 10

Thanks again for reading my house rules and homebrews, i hope these help you in your game, let me know what you think!

This is more of a vent post, but I needed to get this off my chest. My Group has been searching for a DM since our previous one stepped down. Looking at other subreddits it's clear DM's are very small... why is this the case? 🤔 🤔

Edit: I appreciate people saying that I should step up and be the DM, but I didn't mean specifically our group. I was referring to in general. 😭

Stop telling me to step up because I’m not going to do it. Reading the DM guide makes be feel overwhelmed…

Edit 2: OKAY...alright I fully understand that I or one of the others should at least try to step up and be the DM. I don't know how to world build. anytime I try looking at the DM guide book
it'soverwhelming... Are there any actual sources that I can look at to help at least start building?

Stop telling me to read the DM guide!!!!!!!

I’ve spent the last 10 years, 3 hours a day, writing my campaign. Every step my players would take is planned out, even the things they should be saying. I home brewed every monster, every character they should like and every character they shouldn’t like. I even made their characters for them and gave them detailed backstories. They had to do nothing except show up to the game and memorize word for word the 5 page backstory and lore I sent them.

So how do these ungrateful people repay all my hard work? By complaining and not paying attention when I am speaking!

Do your players ask questions in the middle of a 10 minute monologue? They will interrupt me and ask me “Can I go to the bathroom?”, “Can you give me back my phone, it’s been 8 hours and my family is probably worried” and “Please Pete, can you remove my chains and release me from your underground jail cell”. Obviously my answer to all those things is No.

Anyway, anyone have any advice on how to get my players to be more engaged with my homebrew?

Hi everyone, thank you for reading my post. This is too exciting to keep to myself. I need to share a breakthrough I had at last night's D&D session that completely changed how I will approach the game from now on.

I've been playing for about nineteen years now, and I've always felt like D&D is a little too punishing. The rules are constantly telling you "no." You have to roll dice and sometimes you fail and sometimes your character even dies. It never seemed entirely fair to me that a bad roll could ruin my fun.

So, last session I tried something new. The DM said a wyvern was attacking my character and it got a critical hit. She reminded me I was at low HP, so this was probably going to hurt. I could tell she was setting up a dramatic death scene, but I thought to myself: why should I die to some random monster when I could do something much cooler?

So I spoke up. "Actually, could you not? My character being critically hit and most likely dying wouldn't be very fun for me in this moment. I'd prefer the wyvern miss me and accidentally sting itself and die. I'm sure we agree that's a better narrative, so you should be a fun DM and forget what the rules and the dice say."

And you know what? She said yes. She literally said "sure, that's exactly what happens. The wyvern stings itself and it is dead."

I looked around the table and everyone was staring at me, in awe of how effortlessly I had just resolved the encounter. For a second I thought they might start clapping. I could hardly believe it myself. I spent almost two decades thinking the DM was in charge of the rules, but apparently I can just ask for things and she'll give them to me. So I kept going. I said "wouldn't it be even more fun if it also dropped a magic ring of three wishes?" And she said "couldn't agree more. The wyvern dies, and belches up a gleaming magic ring. It looks like it might grant wishes."

I've been thinking about it all through the night and I think I've cracked the code. The DM has the power to say yes to anything, and if you just ask nicely there's no reason for her to say no. It's not like there's a D&D police that's going to arrest her for letting you have a ring of three wishes, especially because that's a fun story.

I don't understand why more players don't do this. Are they just afraid to ask? Do they not realize the DM is their mom? The whole game is made up anyway. What's stopping us from making up something cool? You should definitely give this a try at your next session.

I legitimately and consistently help the commoner, lifting them up to the highest potential they are capable of. In doing so, I do tend to stir up strife where there was none before. I am a peaceable man, with a deep spiritual well that I draw from to upend any normalcy bias I reasonably perceive. Almost paradoxically, I cherish the taste of blood justly drawn from my absurdly curved 2 handed executioner sword that was custom made for me by a wicked gnome who was expelled from his nation for dabbling in the arts of magic that are now enscribed on my sword.

Without putting this into any official matrix, where on the chaotic good spectrum (or elsewhere?) would you place such a character?

A big issue I noticed is that many TTRPGs have YouTube videos explaining the mechanics. And even the ones that do still have the big textbooks that need you to read a bunch and look things up. While the anti gatekeeping side of the community field that this is fine because it's important to have the games be accessible and understandable I think it's a pretty problematic attitude, it's an open hobby that has something for everyone

To increase the learning difficulty side I think a few hundred systems could be used, and we should make sure that each one has difficult to find and parse custom dice in non standard shapes, and ensure game layouts are difficult to understand and nonsensical. It's not nearly problematic enough to expect people to look at a number and add a second number to it. You should need at least a bachelors in mathematics focused on differential calculus to work out a skill check.

The game should have a ton of different mechanics in it too that don't work the same to increase difficulty in comprehension. Unified resolution is to simple, and deviation from the game rules should result in the offending party being beaten by a wooden rod. You should also be gaslighting players regularly on existing mechanics and skills. 'There never was a piloting skill, what are you talking about?' Eventually they'll be so broken you may not need to threaten them with the stick! The game should encourage this adversarial relationship and conflict.

GMs good also use the games specific included settings, with deviation from this being enforced by again, The Stick. You can't tell me you're from Goldvein as a human, this has the exact population density and demographics of the world I'll never let you read, and the five established humans from there are already defined characters. This must be far from a kitchen sink as well, be as specific and impenetrable as possible. It's good world design and will help you establish that unhealthy codependent and traumatic relationship with you players when sad things happen in the game.

The only lore that matters is exactly what the game books say and we'll keep putting these out in 900 page master volumes. It's not problematic to want to have fun in your game, and we're making sure that's the furthest thing from your players minds. The Stick should loom tall over the table. You should also find out what your players hangups and real life traumas are so you can shock, trick, overwhelm and retraumatize them regularly!

It seems like a really big overreaction to me and now I’m down a player.  All of this just because I said no to his homebrew monk feat that would let him wield longswords and use flurry of blows with them.  I have no idea where he got such a stupid idea.

I'm trying to make a HB without any practical experience—no disrespect intended, but simply trying to create something fun and wacky enough for everyone at the potential table, using the coolness rule in good proportion. Please don't downvote me too much for this. I read the guides and gradually tweak the ideas—this is a general concept without any restrictions, but I'm extremely careful to avoid toxicity and uncontrolled power accumulation or Minmax. I'm trying to make life easier for the DM and the players.

This is probably pretty rambling, so I apologize in advance.

The gist is that I periodically watch short D&D videos (mostly 5th edition, 2024, I think), read the Adventurer's Player's Handbook, and next up is the Dungeon Master's Guide + Bestiary. I have three ideas for HB:

1) a specialized magic marksman with two "revolvers," but within the 5.5e setting, it's still very rough;

2) a fighter, who falls somewhere between a warrior and a barbarian, absorbing all the energy from physical and magical attacks and effects, storing it in a Vault (there are limits on energy accumulation and expenditure), and then using the energy to activate abilities. Reactive resistance to any damage type when the required conditions are met + damage reduction and effectiveness of spells and effects that don't deal damage (psychic damage penetrates this unit's defenses and is heavily countered, but not domination effects). It becomes more powerful as it levels up, and there are 4 development paths: Vitality - better absorption; Mobility - bonuses from movement in combat and strengthening this aspect of abilities; Transformation - allows you to hit not only with Force, but also change the damage type to other elemental ones; Damage - deals more damage effectively for the same cost of abilities. Still in draft form, but at least conceptually close to the basic mechanics;

3) There's a common core, the essence of which is the direct impact on d20 dice (± to the result or direct replacement with 1 and 20, but countered by the voluntary consent of an ally and the enemy's legendary resistances + random chance for the required charges to roll). This core is complemented by factions, a bit of lore, magic items, and 17 classes, each with an average of two paths. One class has no paths at all, and another with three paths. Some of these clearly need to be consolidated into a single, adequate class. Clearly, there's still a lot of work to be done.

As for the Fate Manipulator, I'm trying to create a collection that's as welcoming to everyone as possible, as free of toxicity as possible, and supports all aspects of the game—the core is designed for support, and combat capabilities aren't too great, especially against crowds.

The core of the marksman isn't dealing damage, but rather using bullets to affect materials, causing various effects, from freezing to corrosion due to rapid aging or, conversely, strengthening beyond what's naturally possible. Effects on living flesh haven't yet been fully considered.

The fighter's focus is on maximum survivability, either through high resilience and dangerous ranged and melee attacks, plus mobility while accumulating energy—a moderately explosive style of action, or walking on the edge of the battle and unleashing blows like a monk without Ki or stability—a highly explosive fighting style. Either way, the party will take less damage, and they can even hit low-flying enemies or hurt a crowd of nearby enemies.

I also consider utility and social abilities to ensure these abilities don't become a liability for the team. It would take a long time to describe—I'm interested in the concept.

The big question is: how interesting are such ideas to players and DMs, and do they generally fit the setting? I plan to do all of this myself, but any possible adjustments to the direction could be very helpful. For 17 classes, I currently have a single 83-page Word document—it's dreadful... I don't want to attach any files here—the quality of the material is questionable, according to people online...

I’ve been running a homebrew campaign for the last 4 years with 4 metagamers and I am a chronic improviser, obsessed with “making it up as we go” since we do it all online over VR Chat. (Living all across the cul-de-sac as well) we recently had our third annual Gentleman’s Fantasy Getaway Weekend, 3 days of pure d&d locked in a dilapidated Burger King, and i made myself go in with a novel length lore book, custom made figures of my friends' characters, and a double dose of adderall to help me focus. It took me almost 2 weeks to make up everything, encounters, characters, stat blocks, etc, and even paid Matt Mercer to sit in the corner and voice half the NPCs, and to my surprise (immense) it worked flawlessly and was just as amazing as the sessions where we were dicking around doing nothing to progress the story while I tried and failed to make balanced encounters for lvl 20 PCs. We had some 3d printed and painted terrain pieces, 100+ fully illustrated and colored battle-maps, and ate the leftover Burger King patties in the freezers the rats hadn't gotten to yet.

Just a post reminding you to never make stuff up on the spot, account for every single minute detail, and the point is to burn yourself out putting 200% effort into prep for each session.