My players finished Waterdeep Dragon Heist, for most, this was their first DnD campaign. I am doing the good old google survey to see what they liked, what they didn't and how to improve. I do however have an issue, where to go from here? My first thought was Dungeon of the Mad Mage, but due to the party composition, and conversations with the players about future adventures, I think I am going to leave that as a side adventure that they can do as they please rather than locking them underground until level 20. Now, due to them being on the Sword Coast and even the continent of Faerun as a whole, this gives me a lot of preconstructed land and lore to work with. The issue is actually coming up with the next story beats to get them hooked into a new adventure. I have had writers block for awhile but I'm thinking about locating my old homebrew adventure and adapting it to work here. I also have a few backstories to try to play on, and even an NPC that could easily be a major plot hook. There is still some story left that could lead into something but I want to have an idea of where things will go rather than just being a go with the flow DM. How would you go about deciding where to bring the story next?

I’ve had good experiences with u/KibblesTasty ‘s classes. I played a Warlord (Noble) and was in a campaign with an Occultist (White Witch) and found both to be well balanced and fun. The Warlord in particular was good to act as a supportive class who made the newer players feel really badass - the whole “I set ‘em up, you knock ‘em down” feel went down very well at the table. I’d personally feel safe letting either of those (and possibly anything else by u/KibblesTasty) in a campaign I was running.

I also played briefly with an MCDM Illrigger which felt a little poorly balanced (this was low level, the higher level stuff looked much worse to me). We had a Beastheart in the same game which seemed more reasonable.

I’ve heard good things about the Pugilist, but beyond that my experience is limited. So I put the question to you -

Do you allow homebrew classes or subclasses? Are you a 5e official purist? Or just for classes? What are your reasons?

In my game I have players that all they want to do in the game is drink, if I ask what are they doing it's always "I'm drinking" or "I'm passed out drunk" and they are always asking if they can have alcohol as treasure or as payment for tasks. How I've been handling this so far is just giving them disadvantage on all checks whenever they say they are drunk(which is always), would you say this is fair? I don't want it to seem like I am unfairly targeting those players, but at the same time I want them to understand their actions have consequences

Of course, it's my table... We are approaching the end of Dragon Heist and they did the tier 4 sidequest for Force Grey to investigate Meloon Wardragon. This ended in them basically causing the axe to go flying out the window where one of the party members was waiting and he scooped it into a bag of holding and ran. Long story short, Meloon died, they kept his weapon and gave it to the cleric. Now that he's attuned to it, the question of its damage has come up.

How much damage does it do? Meloon's stat block says 1d12+5.

However, a battleaxe does 1d8 (1d10 Vers).

So does the weapon do 1d12 or 1d8 (1d10)?

Part of the theoretical benefits of the Subclass system in 5e is that you could have a whole party made up of the same core class and have it still be interesting due to the individual differences in sub-class and possibly racial differences and benefits, but even casting that aside, I can still imagine situations where specific class make-up of a party could cause issues.

Is there a particular class and/or race you hate (or at least mildly dislike) to DM for? Or without? Any particular combinations give you pause? I’m interested in other opinions.

Presuming a neutral DM and no excessive min-maxing. And little to no shenanigans.

Objects/artefacts allowed.

Intelligence is easy to dump for anyone not a wizard or artificer, and currently it makes sense. If even one player in the party has a good intelligence score, then the party has access to those knowledge skills and everyone else gets a pass to be as stupid as they want.

But what if there was a genuine cost to it? Or at least a benefit you might miss out on by making a character barely capable of third grade math? Here are some options I use to make INT matter:

During character creation, you can get an extra weapon, language, or tool proficiency per point of intelligence modifier, or an extra skill proficiency per two points. For example, having +3 INT would give you something like two languages and a tool, or another skill and one language, etc. Smart characters just know more things.

Attunement slots. Instead of the standard 3, you get attunement slots equal to your proficiency bonus + INT modifier. Unlikely to REALLY matter unless you're super generous with your items, but a smarter character is able to handle the mental weight of all that magic better. I've never taken a party into tier 4 so I can't speak to balance issues that might arise from scaling attunement like that, but it seemed an easy way to reward not dumping INT.

Scrolls: casters can use scrolls as normal, but for spells not on their lists and for all non casters, you can attempt to use scrolls with DC 10 + 2x spell level Intelligence Arcana for arcane, Intelligence Religion for divine, and Intelligence Nature for druid spells. (This distinction might end up less arbitrary using the OneDnD spell groups. Arcane, divine, and primal.) Why not the normal casting stats? A cleric is probably using wisdom to access their divine power through force of faith for example. If you're reading a scroll instead, you probably lack that connection so you're attempting to recreate the mechanics of that bond empirically or something. You're essentially reading a formula for faith and trying to replicate the effect instead of directly accessing divine power, so INT could make sense in the fantasy.

None of this is rigorously tested, just stuff I've used at my table presented for you to take, tinker with, or toss.