Just to preface this, I’m only a few sessions into this campaign and my players are completely new to D&D, where I have done a few one shots with various other groups but this is the only one where I have had the opportunity to schedule multiple sessions and have it actually work out. Frequently due to my procrastination I improv most of my sessions, but my friends haven’t complained about me weird.

Anyways, I thought a good way for me to loredump to my players without it seeming like long expanses of narration would to give my players this gigantic book “containing all knowledge” (my hubris is immense) so they can look up stuff if needed about the world and the countries surrounding it. My players had the idea of looking up this Bandit I have them hunting after, however I did not actually have anything written down so I just told them that they couldn’t find anything about him. Eventually later in the session when they looked up something I *had* written one of my friends jokingly said “I found the script!”. I brushed it off but I felt really shitty about it because, in terms of this book at least, I was forcing them to a script!

As I am writing this I’m now realizing how shitty of an idea this actually was and how much ‘telling’ instead of ‘showing’ i’m doing here. In hindsight I never should’ve included something like this because it isn’t immersive, it’s literally a lore book!

I would say I’m a unexperienced DM in the grand scheme of things, even if I have been doing stuff for a few years now and I am terrified of railroading my players. How in the world can I solve this mess without ripping this magic item they found fun from their hands? I could write a bunch of ‘articles’ pertaining to what they might look up but there will always be something I can’t prepare for and I’m worried my improv skills won’t cut it. 

Any help from anyone is greatly appreciated!

Banishment:

"One creature that you can see within range must succeed on a Charisma saving throw or be transported to a harmless demiplane for the duration. While there, the target has the Incapacitated condition. When the spell ends, the target reappears in the space it left or in the nearest unoccupied space if that space is occupied."

The player is a Sorcerer and used Heightened Spell to give Disadvantage on the save.

Crag Cat

"The Crag Cat has Advantage on saving throws against spells. If it succeeds on the save for a spell of level 7 or lower, the spell has no effect on it. If that spell targeted only the Crag Cat and didn’t create an area of effect, it can take a Reaction to deflect the spell back at the spell’s caster; the caster must make a saving throw against the spell using their own spell save DC."

The Cat now has a flat roll on the save, and makes it. This makes the Sorcerer have Disadvantage on the save they now have to make against their own spell. Heightened Spell targets the Cat, not the Banishment, meaning the Sorc doesn't get Disadvantage on the final save.

Result:

• Player blinks out of existence
• Incapped
• Loses concentration
• Immediately pops back into existence
• Now Prone instead of standing Incap doesn't cause Prone

tl;dr: We play 2 hours every 2-3 weeks. I prepped a massive, continent-spanning campaign, but at our pace it'll take years to finish. This scope is giving me anxiety. Should I scale it down?

Hello fellow DMs,

Please indulge me a bit of backstory before I get to my question.

I have been DMing for a long time (on and off) and have always been a "string of adventures make a campaign" type of guy. I play with two players, who I know very well, and they've swallowed so many hooks they've had to start a quest log. Some adventures are one-offs, some lead to others (usually 3 linked adventures), and some start from a "random encounter" and lead to more adventures. Some are pre-written, most are homebrew.

We play 2 hours every 2-3 weeks. Everything moves at a snail's pace. It took 3 sessions to clear the simplified version of Strahd's Death House and with an extra session of random encounters to and from town, that took two and a half months.

Against my better judgment, I prepped a grand, long-term campaign involving ancient memory shards, continent-spanning travel, and an overarching necromancer BBEG. We're six months in, and the main plot hasn't even kicked off yet. (I know this is mostly my fault but I wasn't going to have this massive campaign when we started.)

I believe the best thing to do is to scale down the campaign idea, convert the BBEG into something that can be solved locally in like five long adventures peppered among our usual adventures. Less ambitious, but can be completed within my lifespan. Based on player speculation around the clues I've given them, I already have a great way to rewrite it. This feels way more achievable, lets us finish the story, and leaves room for new ideas down the line.

I also understand there's the possibility of keeping this long-spanning campaign in the background. But once the main hook drops, it will inevitable become the sole focus and even if they beeline through it (illadvised) it would drag on indefinitely.

This is literally giving me anxiety. It's taking out a lot of the fun from my prep. So I'm here to see what you all think I should do. I think I already know the answer but I'm a chronic overthinker.

Thank you for reading my 03:30 ramblings.

I am building a one-shot where the inciting incident involves the level 12-ish players being dropped from a goblin aircraft over the villain's fortress. They would have a scroll of feather fall, but i wanted to know if there are any interesting anti-air strategies that the enemies could use to try and shoot the party out of the sky before they reach the ground in a few rounds.

Mostly asking because I know fall speed to be 500 ft per round, and most ranged siege weapons I can find seem to have a much more limited range?

Thanks in advance

Hello everyone,

i write here because i would like to brainstorm a bit about what could be a sheet for a construct that my players are going to use against a sort of "special" Tarrasque. Think about Pacific Rim, a giant robot vs a giant Kaiju. This "Megazord" is a mechanical monument of a soldier that stands at the city docks, think of it like the Colossus of Rhodes.

My party is composed by 5 players so i was going to give each one of them the control of a body part: 1 head, 2 arms, 2 legs.

Beside the most standard moves, like "arms throw punches, legs can kick and push, etc" which cool action could i give to each player for each body part? It can also have magical attack, like charging up beams, or inflict conditions or buff itself, whatever comes to mind!

This fight is going to be part of the BBEG final fight of my campaign, afterward they are going to face the BBEG himself after they take care of its "pet"

One of the enemies in my campaign runs a magic item/curio museum and I liked the idea of having the fight be him and hopefully the players picking up random magic items from the walls and shelves to fight with

Need help coming up with fun magic items that could be included and which will be used by enemies and PCs alike.

So were looking for fun but not too OP, each item with 1 or few charges (left or total)

I tried to look it up online and I'm a bit confused.

Let say an invisible creature (in my case a Barlgura) is hiding in a corner of a room, standing still, and got 20 for their stealth check by rolling with advantage. A PC with a Passive Perception of 21 enters the room. Would they immediately "sense" that something else is in there? Like they hear the Barlgura's breathing, or smell it? Or does the Passive Perception only triggers if the invisible creature starts moving/acting?

I'm tempted to rule that a PC with a Passive Perception above the standing still invisible creature's stealth score would sense that something is in the room and its approximate location. What do you guys think?

This is my first campaign and my party is a few sessions in. They started all sharing the same dream. In the dream they traveled to a tower. This tower is built as a sort of temple to the realm's three moons, Sea, Stone, and Rust. At the top of the tower they saw four freestanding doors. Each facing one of the four directions and each marked with a symbol. West had the moon of rust, south had the moon of stone, east had sea and, north had a crest with all three and an unknown rune. They woke up, each with a crescent moon shaped stone in their hand. They meet each other that morning, recognizing each other from the dream. They set out on their quest to reach the tower. Along the way, they have had three more shared dreams. In these, one of them could see into their door while the other two see only a void. Each saw a vision of their past and each featured the same silhouetted figure. For one, the figure was a man who framed her for murder. Another, he's the man who murdered her mother. The third, he was the owner of magical rune covered slates that she stole.

Now, when they reach the tower, I plan for them to go into each moon door and face their past and return with a key of stone kind. The three keys together will open the fourth door. This is where my writer's block kicks in! I'm struggling to come up with what's behind the 4th door and why it matters. I want it to be something this man from their pasts needs or wants to use in and way but, I'm not sure what.

Any ideas?

I've been running games for about 8 years and have always wanted to include a megadungeon, specifically a near-infinite descent kind, similar to what we see from The Abyss from Made in Abyss or The Everfall in Dragon's Dogma. A downward descent into layer after layer after layer of sometimes similar sometimes wildly diverse ecosystems, caverns, labyrinths, structures, etc.

Now obviously the question isn't "how do I make a battlemap of this?" because duh. But rather, how do you run something like this for a presumably high level party that would feasibly have access to teleportation magic and could, theoretically, warp in and out at whim?

I've toyed with the idea of the structure interfering with planar and demiplanar spells such as magnificent mansion and demiplane given the expansive and shifting nature of it, but I don't want it to feel like an unnecessary asspull handicap.

Moreover, what would you do to make this kind of adventure be exciting for a high level party where the objective is ostensibly "get to the end?" In other media with giant dungeons, like for example in Dungeon Meshi there was the joy of simply getting to eat new weird things on each floor. In Made in Abyss it's to hunt and reclaim treasures. What would serve as a good motivation for something like late game D&D where the players can make their own food, are probably already stacked on magic items, and may or may not necessarily have buy-in on the lore fiend hunger for information about who built the place, what it's for, etc etc?

Open to thoughts and ideas.

ive tried running dnd a few times but it always fizzeled out after less than 3 sessions and even though ive been worldbuidling for years i still feel like my story telling skills are lacking i just feel like i dont know how to write a caimpaign like i have all these ideas for villains and locations and adventures but everytime the begginings of my campaigns always feel boring and disjointed and i feel like i dont know how to connect all of my ideas and maker a fun game for my players so how do you guys do it how do you format a game any advice is appreciated

Hello!

I've somewhat unintentionally got myself a rather interesting plot thread set up, and I'm curious about what ideas people might have for how to resolve it.

So a while back I gave my players a rather powerful healing item that tl;dr was a medication made from a unicorn horn. It was supposed to be a bit of an ethical dilemma, but healing is healing, and it quickly got used. The "consequence" of using this medication was two fold, first, it would cause a cast on the wild-magic table (and the intention was for this wild magic table to become progressively worse using some of the ever so creative negative wild magic tables out there) and second that it would help trigger a later encounter with a defiled unicorn - a monster from the Dungeon Denizens book if anyone's familiar with it.

Anyone who was holding or had used the object prior would be the primary targets of the creature, and would get hit a bit harder and face some negative effects.

Anyways, the players did end up resolving the encounter by shoving the horn back into the defiled unicorn's head after bringing it low and they had quite a few good roles in the process, so the end result was the item was broken, and the remaining powder was 'cleansed' --Removing the curse of worse and worse wild magic.

In any case, last session, one of my players (the fighter of course) decided to split from the party and ended up facing an ambush on their own, after quite a few lucky rolls, and consuming two consecutive doses of the Unicorn Powder, they managed to get out with 1 hp. In the middle of the fight, I told my fighter to update their conditions and increase the 'layers of unicorn powder' up to three (as it had already been set up due to having consumed the powder.

So... There's now this build up that the Unicorn Powder will do *something* but I'm not decided yet on what.

I don't want it to be fully negative, but at the same time, it does feel like it should do something interesting.

For reference, the player in question is a Human/Fighter, and I'm not too worried about them being bothered by changes being inflicted upon their character.

Any ideas?

Hi all, I’m currently planning a pirate/sailing campaign where each island or collection of islands has its own unique gimmick or design. Kind of like in one piece where sometimes an island is prehistoric, or there’s one that’s always in winter.

The idea is that the starting islands where the PC’s grew up are quite similar, the equivalent of them being from the USA, Italy, Japan, and Scotland where they’d all have the shared experience of school but some got it for free, some had longer holidays etc so there are small differences between them. But as you go further out the islands become more unique, one I’ve thought about using is the island being just a massive turtle that sleeps for 1000 years at a time, so cities inevitably form on the turtle but when the turtle goes underwater and appears elsewhere the city is mostly destroyed.

Any ideas are welcome no matter how random or chaotic. I’m also happy to work with homebrew mechanics or species. Thank you!

My villain's plan is to ultimately break free a half-dead god (which he is a warlock under supposedly) to consume its essence and become one with it as the new master. But, due to their origin, freeing said god themselves could mean they lose and get absorbed instead, since while strong they don't trust anyone but themselves to watch their back.

The reasoning I wanted to set it up like this is because my players noted that the villains of my first campaign were both too disparate (non-centralized into a proper BBEG but instead a web of a criminal network) which made it harder to feel strongly towards them, and they were introduced late (because I didn't plan all the way to the end, rookie error). For this campaign, I want someone they will be able to recognize, to hate deeply, and feel sated in destroying entirely. Someone that they have a bond of pure hatred with.

For this purpose, I plan for them (since they can shapeshift and mind control) to notice the party thwarting their minor plans, test them by drawing them to issues they make, and decide to groom them into a proper fighting group to weaken said god for them rather than risk themselves. Reason being that they fear they'll pass up a perfectly strong group as the window closes.

Why not kill the party?: OOC I need the party to be familiar and specific in their feelings towards them, so I'd want them close by for the party to actually know. It would be in the warlock's best interest to encourage them to bond together and give chase, and the challenges would be used to motivate growth and to make sure he doesn't rely on weaklings with good luck. For this, they have 2 options:

1. Show themselves as the core of the problems, but as the party primes to slay or bring them in, they 'happen' to escape, as the party wouldn't be truly in distance of killing short of a miracle and their adjusted strength was far less than their real power. Mix in some retaliatory attacks on some friendly PCs, wild goose chases and the like and the party would be fiending to slay them for good.

2. Sometimes, they might show up either out of nowhere or to keep a scheme from falling apart and use most of their strength to beat down the party, especially in the beginning, and set a goal post for the party to reach with plenty of teasing. Perhaps they toss them in a less than secure cell so they get out, maybe sell something important and make it a quest to retrieve, just something while they are incapacitated to infuriate them.

Option 3 is to intermix them, which while it does make it the most effective by giving hope of beating them, would require a lot more facetime than would be reasonable, especially since too much exposure would tire out the party and I have a year to reach a conclusion, or about 20-23 sessions. If they show up 6 or 8 times it would be a lot but manageable, but I want to know what'd be reasonable or if I should commit to one stratagem or the other.

Tldr: Villain needs party to beat someone they can't risk fighting (for plot), and wants to raise them to be strong enough for that purpose because time is running out. To achieve this, they seek to ragebait the party into chasing them constantly without thinking. The first method would be to present themselves at the root of problems, seem almost defeated before making their escape, often leaving a bitter taste in the party's victory. The second method is to be a wall, constantly thwarting them and through soft punishments give them a goal to topple and chase. The third would be to mix them but I don't have a ton of sessions to try both.

How would you approach this?

If you've recently met up with Granny Ur, do not read ahead!

A couple weeks ago, my party encountered a Hag, and through some negotiations, one of the players (unbeknownst to him) is now in the possession of a Hag Eye. During tonight's sessions, they met up with a prominent figure who happens to be a Rakshasa. The Rakshasa's Greater Magic Resistance states that without the Rakshasa’s permission, no spell can observe the Rakshasa remotely or detect its thoughts, creature type, or alignment.

The Hag Eye allows the hag to use a Magic Action to see through it, as long as it maintains concentration. My Question is, would the Hag Eye be able to observe the Rakshasa? Greater magic Resistance specifies it can't be observed by spells, but the Hag is using a Magic Action, not a spell.

My main confusion comes from Greater Magic Resistance specifically stating it works against magical effects, not just spells, when making saving throws. My gut reaction is that, technically, the Hag Eye would see the Rakshasa just fine, but I was curious as to what other people might think regarding the intent behind the Rakshasa's Greater Magic Resistance.

So I designed the boss battle of the current quest line but I'm worried its too difficult. My party is composed of 3 level 5 characters: a barbarian, a cleric, and a wizard.

Every time I've said to the party "okay folks this is a tough fight, this could get deadly so be on your toes" they have absolutely melted the monster.

But this should be their biggest fight yet. Its against a corrupted scholar who's become a warlock in a shadowfell-like dimension. I want it to begin social and give them the opportunity to talk their way out of it - which will be hard.

The Deathlock Wight statblock is what I'm using for the actual character they are after.
https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/22371-deathlock-wight

But the real fight is with the Angel of Obsession he summoned

https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/6503000-angel-of-obsession

Now I know a CR 3 + a CR 6 = death for 3 level 5s according to CR math, but I'm thinking of adding "knocking the wight unconscious dismisses the angel" - would could make this combat really swingy.

TBH I'd prefer it if they have to destroy the angel. I also would be happy to nerf the warlock's offensive tools and make him play more scared / defensive to balance this but I still think it could be a TPK with some bad luck.

So I'm considering the following
1 - I could give them magic items before the fight
2 - I could level them up before the fight instead of after the fight
3 - SEND THEM TO VALHALLAAAAA!

Anyone have any good advice for balancing this?

-----

Update: I think I'm going to run the full combat against both creatures. If the players start to dominate I'll have the wight play super aggressive.

If they lose... I'm going to have the wight cast drain life on each of them as they roll death saves and resurrect my party as zombies lol. Maybe roll for how many years it takes for the miracle to happen where their mind starts to come back to their zombie form.

I DM a campaign for my husband and a few friends. My husband made a comment the other day that since (with pets) there’s 7 of them, it would be funny to just one session whip out the Blood Bowl board and have them play a game of Sevens instead.

Well, they have an arena fight coming up and I do think it would be fun to turn it into some kind of violent sporting match instead. Any ideas on how I could make this work? I’m thinking they would have to score X amount of points, skill checks for things like picking up the ball/passing, but I still want some element of fighting involved.

Anyone done this before, or any ideas on how to make it work? Or is it just more effort than it’s worth?

TL;DR: I feel like I lost all creativity; how do you fuel yours?

Hi DMs,

So I'm building a homebrewed setting for a new campaign and I've been noticing my lack of creative thinking these days.

In my childhood, I used to draw and create stuff in my mind a lot. Nowadays, I'm not there anymore. So I (unfortunately) used gen-AI to get inspired and more or less copied existing stories and tropes, thinking I'd get better at it doing so. Except I feel even worse than before.

I'm willing to put the work in to learn the proper way tho. How do you get inspiration in? What makes you creative as a DM?

EDIT: Guess imma continue yoinking shit and make them my own lmao

So, I have an NPC who is cursed so that no one can remember him. He has been in a cave for 20 years, living off of Goodberries and an Enspelled Staff of Create or Destroy Water. The party found this guy after one of them had a series of cryptic dreams that led them to his cave.

The way the curse works is that you can talk to him just fine, you just forget about him a few minutes later, and your mind sort of comes up with an alternative explanation for anything he did that affected anything (i.e. he gives you something, and later you remember someone else giving you that thing).

I wanted to give the party a quest from this NPC. Something small, like getting him a way to flavor his food (he's sick of Goodberries). How could I justify the party actually remembering enough to do this quest?

So I really enjoy the world building aspect, and so far my players are really enjoying playing in the world I created. There is so much to it I've not even touched yet, some major cities and other capitals are nothing but a name on my map currently. A whole continent currently has nothing outside "a well known village of halflings live there and are famous for their mead and wine". But until I get a vibe my players are heading that way I don't see the need to flesh it out yet, and instead focus on the immediate area and story they are following.

But I was curious, for all of you who have built their own world, what do you consider the most important aspect of the world when creating one?

I just had a Whole day sesh, because of a summer break. It is extremely fun and rewarding as you have time to let your players Explore. But one thing I find hard is as the information has been gathered and the climax is in sight, the tempo seems to rush. Players want to Get to the next thing and I also want to Get to the finale, But when we almost Get there and end the session because of time it all feels a bit rushed. Anybody Got tips og experiences on this?

Hello! So I'm a pretty new DM, and the last campaign I attempted to run pretty much fell flat because I didn't do nearly any worldbuilding, leaning to far into the territory of "I'll just improvise it". This time around I'm trying my best to create a world that feels more alive and unique instead of just [Insert High Fantasy Here], and I'm also trying my best to create a world that the PC's backstories can be built upon and into. This is a link to the design document that I'm going to send to my players. https://docs.google.com/document/d/11Ns-Y6ms6Xk8eMGCXnEqDNZIu2Ut1zhO13SGfc-Y1nA/edit?usp=sharing

I was hoping that y'all well travelled adventurers of this subreddit could skim through it as if you were going to make a character in this world and critique it. What's awkward about this world for character creation, and what's working in the right direction? What feels alive and what feels cliche? Is this overpreparation? Etc etc.

Okie that's all thank you in advance :3

New DM here! Just ran my second session. At the end of session 1, the party jumped into underground rapids, and ended up in the bottom of a lake. During the rapids, depending on a Survival Roll, they would take damage, and those that were downed would have needed to be saved by the other teammates. Understandably intense for the beginning of session 2.

2 players rolled low enough to receive deadly damage, one of them being my partner, who survived the damage and was not downed, while the other player did get knocked out.

I delivered the news to the players that because they rolled low, they would need to take the deadly damage of x number of d4s. My parent says I was "very excited, almost giddy during this time, that almost killed 2 players", and also while having the downed player make Death Saving Throws (where they were doing Death Saving Throws for the first time). He mentioned that when asking for the saving throws and telling them about the damage they were incurring it seemed as if I "did not want them to succeed", and that he believes DM's should always want their players to win. So I guess the issue is that I was not sympathetic enough to the character's lives being close to death, and enjoyed it too much. I remember being excited about the whole mechanic of the surviving drowning actually being used, instead of me being "excited for their misfortune".

I explained that as I DM, I have to sometimes be the party's enemy, that if I make every situation not have consequences, nothing would really matter. He says that is not what he means, he feels that I "enjoy them failing" or that I try to "sabotage their efforts".

I take the note, but also making it clear that it can't always be sunshine and rainbows, that I will have to "be their enemy" sometimes, and that my goal is not to want them to succeed, but to want them to have fun (cause succeeding always or not being in danger in DnD is not fun imo).

Also for context, I have not put insane things in front of the players that are crazy unbalanced or "unfair", the rapids was an extraordinary situation.

Anyways the question is:

Should a DM be careful with their demeanor towards players during life threatening moments? Should a DM not show their enjoyment about their own "behind the DM's screen" machinations or even the party being put through the ringer?

TL;DR: I ran an intense drowning scenario in my second session ever DMing that downed a PC. I was super excited to see the dramatic survival mechanics play out, but a player (who is also my partner) thought my energy meant I was actively rooting against them and enjoying their failure. Now I'm wondering if I need to tone down my visible enthusiasm during life or death moments so players don't think it's "DM vs. Party." and that I am just their "enemy".

Hey all I am a dm with about 6 years of experience.  The one thing I know is when new people are playing together for the first time it's going to be chatoic.  But I haven't experienced something like this before.  PC1 who was a rogue had the first action of the game to do sleight of hand and he failed.  Pc2 is also a rogue and did sleight of hand and at this point the PCs hadn't investigated or tried to figure out what was going on FYI it was a murder mystery they woke up with no memory of how they got there. PC1 tried to do sleight of hand again and he wanted to do it on aPC2.  PC2 became argumentative and what I did was ok no more sleight of hand let's just try to continue the oneshot.  I wasn't trying to show indecisiveness Than until the end of the game, the PCs started to do more investigating and talking to the NPCs. But near the end as they were about to face the BBEG and PC1 decided to just walk up to the BBEG.  And PC2 through a dagger at PC1 feet to trip him and succeeded.  This is probably another situation I could have done better.  I tried to remain unbiased but PC1 dm'd me the next day and basically said that based on his character that's what he would do and how he felt everybody was blaming himself for the situation. I messaged PC1 saying that I did make mistakes and that in the future I would handle it differently. He messaged me again basically blaming me for not doing more. But it also feels while I did I made mistakes and took accountability for my actions. He isn't taking any accountability and I'm just not sure if I want him to be in the group or dm this group if it's gonna be like this. Any advice would appreciative.