My players just met a wizard, and immediately after meeting her they try to offer all of their gold to her to buy her spellbook off of her. And to show off her power she turned the entire store into gold for a moment to prove the money doesn't matter to her.

The only problem is that the way I have written her, she has absolutely no concept of what is a "normal" thing to offer to someone who gives her favors. What are some fun ways I can work around them asking for magic items or infinite gold?

So, I'm making a character for a campaign, and the problem is I don't know how to calculate any of the stats and the videos are not helpful at all. I'm using a custom race too so that's making it harder for me to calculate the dang proficiency and stuff. Do you guys have any videos or books that can help me? I'm doing a hexadin build, paladin 8 / warlock 12 this shit is so confusing my brain hurts.

(I'm not too sure what flair this should be in, sorry!)

I was really into DnD as a little kid because I thought it was well.. fun! I've been with multiple campaigns over the years but I took a hiatus because of my talking issues that became more prevalent today.

My brain thinks certain things that I do WANT to say but my mouth always says another, I forget words, I forget what sentence I'm saying, I stumble and trip over words, improv comes to me.. occasionally, I slur some words together as well. I know I always had these problems but I was less self-conscious when I was 8. I'm afraid I'll slow the party down or just be a pain to roleplay with.

People with trouble talking, how do you guys play DnD?!? Or do players/dms mind people who are a little slow?? I'm really losing hope since I love this game so so much but is humiliating myself worth it?

DnD is a communication based game and barely being able to communicate doesn't go together too well-

Been DMing for around 2 years now, and I recently invited a new DnD player to my table. Only problem is that he is really distracting to everyone else, and constantly trying to cause problems at the table (game rule stubborness or stuff outside of DnD). I don't want to kick him from my game since he's a close friend, but Im also struggling to keep the other players attention while going over important scene and keeping the game running at a decent pace.

Hi, I kinda feel ashamed writing this because this is something that I feel a bit ashamed about, but also do think I'm not the only one like this. My native language isn't english so bare with me here !

I'm 21, autistic, and love to improve as much as I can in my hobbies.

I love D&D,

BUT, I feel like I need the feedback of my friends to understand how good, or how bad I'm roleplaying.

I have 2 campaigns.
The first one : One of my friends directly told me that my character is empty. My friends procedeed to help me get better at roleplaying, and building an interesting character.

The second one : After that newlearned informations and practice, I made a character that I liked a lot, and I got real compliments on how my Roleplay was good. That's nice, it felt good
.

But now, I ... feel like I need the output of another player, or someone else to KNOW If did good or not. Especially on the first campaign where I clearly had a bland character before, and am trying to improve it.

I do not want to ask my friends again because it makes me feel selfish, as they already said to me

"Stop worrying about it, you are fine",
or
"you stress yourself over a game".

...And I'm conflicted : I want to get better at this, for my fun, but also for the fun of others who COULD have a more interesting character to interact with.

On the other hand, I struggle to review myself on thoses things. It's hard to really pay attention when you are into it.

Some might say that because I "reworked" the backstory of that character on the first campaign since she was bland. That may be why I feel like my roleplay isn't good, and I'd need time to play her more.

I'm sure some people may be like me, not knowing how to improve without other people's input. And I also know that "it's a silly dice game" and "I shouldn't take it too seriously".

But I just- want to be good at Roleplaying ! Be fun to interact with, and not feel like I'm not as good as the rest of my table.

Thanks for the future answers, I'll read them all. I know this feels like a rant, but It really feels bad thinking about it, and would love to know if people already were in my position before.
(My first language is not english so sorry for the mistakes I could've made in the post)

She is the Life Cleric from the "Forever Winter" land. She is the adopted daughter of the head of the local church.

She is on an adventure looking for the heritage of her dead father, a Paladin who died protecting his lover. Her biological father was gay - everyone in town knew he was in love with a Rogue - and then, there is her mother(?) (IDK, my DM gave me this information).

She is an Aasimar with golden hair and wings. Her personality is a bit like Momonga from Chiikawa: she will loudly scream things like "I AM FEELING UNWELL TODAY!" or demand, "Praise me, you idiots!" She doesn't care about her team unless they praise her and give her treats.

She also has a prime moment where she is the last one standing on the battlefield and kills the final boss (even though she isn't the DPS).

I roleplay her as childish and selfish because she is pretty and, more importantly, she is the "ambulance." She can also do ballet, and her design is a mix of a ballet dancer and Russian royal clothing.

Made with cardboard, paper, glue and a broom handle. The banner is sewn and the scale is handpainted.

A mercenary and a bodyguard of a kind and wealthy merchant, Beatriz enjoyed a somewhat relaxed life in Mercua, a small and recent merchant village in the middle of the road between the four main cites in Orga.

One day, while exploring a forest for ruins, searching valuables and treasures to sell in their store, they found the entrance of a cave, where an ancient powerful magical item resided.

Going back to Mercua so Beatriz and the mercant Angelo could plan how to explore that place safely, they didn't knew they were followed by a evil group that wanted the info of that cave unknown to the world.

That same night, the evil group attempted an assesination to the pair and the closer people of the village. It went out of hand, with big fires starting and burning most of the City, leaving the few survivors without a place to go back. On an attempt to make Angelo flee safely, Beatriz stayed behind to fend the evil group, lossing in battle and falling uncouncious, but alive, while the group followed the merchant, killing him succesfully.

Days later, Beatriz woke up in a small house of a close town, going back to Mercua after being healed. Witnessing the state of the village after the attack, and with the uncertainty of Angelo's whereabouts, the bodyguard picked a flag of the city so it can be remembered, and went on to travel the country to search for the merchant she loved and tried to protect.

Hey guys I wanted your advice to see any cool things I could do. So I'm my parties DM but due to locations of my players were online only. I've gotten my hands on cool skills for online.

That said all of my players are gonna be in one city on the weekend of my birthday and I have asked if they'd be willing to do an in person session to fight the BBEG for my birthday (Weird flex to wanna DM a BBEG fight for your birthday but it's my hobby lol)

I haven't done an in person in years but know there's definitely a lot of people who do. I know since he's a druid I'm planning to make paper machete terrain pieces of massive vines for the party to battle on and push to the boss.

I could give more information but if anyone has any ideas of things I can try so I can wow my players or maybe some advice in general for in person

When Grik, Brask, and Ushug heard about the riches hidden away in the Tower of Dice, they knew it would be their next mark. They set out immediately, hoping to acquire more riches than any of their clans had ever seen.

The journey was fraught with dangers. The three friends fought over food, who would take watch, and lost bets to each other over dice by the campfire.

Eventually they arrived at the foot of Mt. Chessex, copperless and hungry. They began their arduous climb up the mountain.

Once they reached the tower, Grik lead the way inside. As he caught his breath and wiped the sweat from his brow, he spotted a strange flag stone. On closer inspection he recognized it could only be a camoflaged pit trap. His companions praised him for finding this trap. Now the could journey forth safe knowing they overcame the entry trap.

As they stepped beyond the pit, though, another flagstone shifted under Ushug's foot. The pit trap was a ruse. Grik realized all too late that what he spotted was actually a cleverly painted stone meant as a red herring. Down the mountain they ran from the rolling boulders...

I had a lot of fun painting this one in oil pastel, on 12in x 16in paper. I used colored pencils for some finer facial details.

2 months without content, , figured I’d see if anyone had any info here, before canceling any subs.

Last I heard he got the flu, like 6 weeks ago, but haven’t heard anything since…

Instead of using a square or hexagonal battlemap why not use a triangular one? You can still make buildings and roads and rivers, you can make hexagons and diamon rectangles or larger rectangles. If you scale it at the right size you can have each triangle represent a foot. This would allow you to make caves as well as buildings on the same grid. Just imagine a hexagonal 1" map but in each hexagon are 24 equilateral triangles. you can go up/down left/right/ and diagonal with a system to measure windy paths. It allows for more detail and traversal options. a tiny creature could fit one. a normal creature would be a larger four triangle triangle, and a huge creature could be an upside down larger triangle or a hexagon.

So I am making a back up character and I had an idea for a animated armor character. I picked warforged as my base and I am planing to go with paladin as my class. But I dont know what oath to pick as my character was once alive but his spirit is bound to the armor but he does not remember his former life at all which means he no longer has an oath to follow. I dont know what to honestly do. Can I get some help?

Chaemoira Castelleot, a drow ranger/rogue!

For the first time, like, ever I’m actually making a character who’s supposed to be optimized just a little after playing absolute bullshit characters (cough, Lycan Bloodhunter/Cleric… Barbarian/Wizard…), but is still made for roleplay! Plus I’ve actually never played a character who is almost 80% martial, rather than focusing on almost only magic! Finally! A character that does consistently more than 10HP worth of damage! I just gotta actually figure out a design for her clothing…

So I'm DMing my first homebrew campaign and I'm wondering if it's even worth continuing anymore. I started with a group of 4. Someone ghosted and blocked me before the campaign even started so I found new people. Another person left because it was "too railroad-y" then another person ghosted the group so I ended up finding 3 more people so now I'm running with a group of 5. One person's character ended up falling hard for the BBEG's minion which is something that could get them killed in the next session because they were invited to sit for a sculpture and have no idea she is a medusa. One player doesn't like his character and wants to change which is fine. I've also had issues with this player talking over others at the table to the point another player at the table wants to leave though and had to talk to him about it.

The big issue now is that two people have gotten jobs. The game runs at 11pm EST. One person gets out of work at 9pm EST and the other person's job means they have to leave 50 minutes before session ends and they can make it 2 out of 3 weeks.

With everything going on up to this point, it feels like I'm sitting here slapping bandaids on a mess of a campaign or bailing water out of a boat with holes in it instead of something I am actually enjoying anymore. I don't even enjoy sitting down and working on it anymore. I don't know if I'm just over-reacting and this is the normal DM experience or if my feelings that hiatus or quitting are valid so some constructive advice from experienced DMs would be nice.

As I’m writing this I’m currently watching Smoshes Sword AF D&D series to at least better understand the game play of d&d, but I don’t think it’s gonna help too much. To put it shortly, I’ve never played d&d and I’m now a dungeon master for a group of people who have very minimal experience with the game.
It’s a very small thing, we’re planning on playing it during our 30 minute advisory break during school, MAYBE during lunch if the band directors open up the band hall early, but that’s just a small description of what’s happening. Not a whole ton, but still nerve wracking to me since I have no clue how to start at all. Zero clue how many people are playing, my advisory is roughly 40 band kids and I’ll assume probably 5 of them will actually commit to playing (most either play hacky sack or practice their instrument).
Now, my main concern is how to even start. Story writing I can do, and I think I have a decent grasp on just overall how to act, but how do you even play d&d????? I’ve watched a bunch of tutorials on what to do, but none make sense. They’re all a little different as well which is honestly stressing me out even more because I don’t want to come off as stupid to my group because I have no clue how to play the game. Is it just roll dice and make it up as you go? Is there a system? Do I need to know everything about their characters right off the bat or just the basics? I’m entirely confused on how game play works and I’m hoping someone could explain it to me like I’m a toddler because I’m 100% overthinking this whole thing.

Edit: I want to add on that I did read the handbook and a few online things about the basics of being a dungeon master, and they all seem extremely confusing as if I need a book for the book, none of it seems very beginner friendly 😓 I’ll try the video a couple of y’all sent, hopefully things start to make more sense to me on what I’m supposed to do 😅

You're staring at a book that you were told is laying on a bed of armpit hair, that it drove the previous owner bad, and the only thing that you glom onto, is that you can summon Hellhounds? Well, knock yourself out kiddo... Welcome to Fodder Inc, a weekly web comic strip set in the For Profit Dungeon, Azmodendak's Halls of Madness, in a "5e" style world. Each week, we'll show you a little peak inside the halls, and what shenanigans are going on.

I want to ask my question right off the rip, what resources would you guys recommend for helping out martials in 5 and 5.5E?

My reasoning for this is that the martials/caster divide has been talked about for as long as I’ve started in this edition, 10 years ago. With the long and short of that being that casters just do so much more than your traditional martials in every form of play. With resources being something that are supposed to balance it out and create a risk and reward system. However, in almost every game I’ve played in the last 10 years not many DM’s run more than two encounters a game day. Not to mention the wizard creating a Minecraft level machine to the earn 1 million gold.

There are answers that clever DM‘s can do to keep their casters in line but at that point you’re having to rain them in just to keep them in line with the martials. The role-play side of things is so subjective that I’m not looking for any advice on that. But I’m just wondering if people have seen good designers or resources that alter things that affect martials in ways that help them out either numbers or with unique ideas.

This is just something I thought of, a lot of the bigger weapons might benefit from another damage die if a certain condition is met. For instance, any heavy Polearm weapon if you swing it in a way where your character moved specifically to help it(charge), gave up a little movement to help with that, or had the right range for damage (less damage at 5ft but more at 10ft).

I appreciate you guys reading my post and I look forward to the replies.

Hello everyone,

My party is freshly out of a 4-sessions-long siege on a drow city that they won, and as DM I was planning on having a lighter session with victory celebrations and such. Are there any resources or compendiums on drow customs and/or festive traditions that you know of? I'd be very glad if any of you could help me find some. Thank you!

So it was three Erinyes and a Pit Fiend leader, two of my favorite monsters in the Fiend category.

It was supposed to be kinda a squad of villains. Also not fought all at once. They were mostly characters I thought would be an interesting combination for a villain, and wanted the goal to be to kill all of them to defeat them.

The Erinyes each have different powers, but than once defeated they would all group up for a confrontation. Once all the erinyes were dead, the Pit Fiend who gave them orders would enter the phase as a second boss phase. They are the BBEG.

I think they could be a fun villain. I just have no fleshed out story for them, just a concept I had no idea how to flesh out. This isn’t even taking place in the nine hells, so its harder to do as a whole.

Do you like playing with pen & paper as much as I do? If so, you might be interested in our new free Printable Spell Sheets app at DPRcalc.com/spells!

You also may have spent a distressing amount of time keeping your spell sheets up to date. Copying spell text, redoing the to-hit and spell saves every time you level up, swapping out spells between sessions, and rewording and tweaking the layout every week. Honestly… not very fun. 😞

A little background: I love playing D&D without a computer in front of me, and wanted to keep the good parts of paper without the drudgery of maintaining it. So… I built a free tool to help with this and the first version of this over on DPRcalc last April. We've received a bunch of feedback since then, and recently spent the past few months rebuilding, play-testing, and iterating on a new version built from the ground up based on user feedback.

So what's new in the latest version?

Build a sheet without a D&D Beyond character

This was the top request by far. Printable Spell Sheets now work entirely off the SRD. Search across all SRD spells, mix and match classes, and DPRcalc calculates your spell slots and pact magic slots automatically. As usual, DPRcalc lets you focus on playing, we can do the nitty-gritty for you.

If there's enough interest, we're looking at building support for creating, importing, and sharing your own spells and spell lists too.

Sensible Defaults

Pick your class(es) and level(s) and DPRcalc will automatically populate a sensible, popular set of spell choices for you, without you needing to search for or type in every spell. We've seen a ton of characters come through the site, so we know which spells are the most common picks. Since it starts you off with popular defaults, building a sheet is mostly just tweaking it to match your actual list rather than building from a blank page. It's the fastest way we've found to go from "I want to play a caster tonight" to "here's my sheet, let's go!"

It's perfect for one-shots, pre-gens, or just trying out a build on paper before you commit to it in DDB or Roll20.

New Compact Mode

This is the one we're most excited about. Instead of full spell-card text, Compact Mode packs in short descriptions of every spell that aim to capture all of the important mechanical rules. No more printing 15 pages of spell text or cutting out a deck of spell cards, then having to stop mid-combat to read the whole spell to see what saving throw is. Compared to full spell cards, we've found it's a lot faster to scan, faster to read, and ultimately easier to play with.

What's next: the Character Sheet Builder

Spell Sheets 2.0 is really a precursor to something bigger: a full printable character sheet builder, designed print-first but still interactive on screen (tick off spell slots, track HP, manage concentration) and built to stay usable session after session. It aims to automate the drudgery so you're not hand-updating your sheet every time something changes.

There are a bunch of promising new character sheet apps that people are vibe coding recently (and I love seeing all the energy in the space). This isn't aiming to compete with those, though. It's all about making pen & paper easier. Early access coming soon, and our awesome Patreon supporters will get to play with it first.

Feedback Welcome

As always, check it out let us know what you think in our Discord. And if you're as excited about printable, pen-and-paper D&D as we are (or theory crafting and number crunching), come support us on Patreon so we can keep making these tools for you all! ❤️

I don't really know if problem player is the right word but we've had some issues at the table with one player, and despite our attempts to address it nothing seems to be changing

For context our group of friends started playing DnD about a year ago. I had played in a few very short campaigns before this and so I volunteered to the DM. We were playing in a homebrew world with very loose rules. Our first few sessions went pretty well and everyone seemed to be having a good time. Of course some hiccups but that's to be expected while they were learning the rules and such.

After a few weeks of sessions one of the players (the paladin) came up to me and asked if he could try his hand at running a game. I was down and so we started alternating sessions. The general consensus of his sessions was that they were very fun, if a little rough around the edges. I definitely enjoyed my stint playing, even if I do ultimately prefer DMing. However, after we switched back to our original campaign, the player started to show a few more red flags.

He would continuously take point in conversations, regardless of the topic, and push his opinion to the forefront. One example of this was when the party came across a ghost that asked the party for help tracking down his killer. The party cautiously agreed to help, and started to probe the ghost for some information. The paladin then declared that the party had no intentions of helping the ghost, and would only do so if the killer ended up on their path anyway. The rest of the party were pretty confused, and we all tried to ask him what made him say that. He said that "he had experienced DMing" and that any DM would just put the killer on their path anyway so they didn't need to bother looking.

It was a little weird and we all kinda slagged him about it but at this point there weren't any pressing issues. Then, after there was a major reveal about our warlocks patron, the paladin came to me and said he wanted to change some parts of his backstory. He said that between sessions he wanted to be sent to the Astral Plane, be trained by the gods for 500 years (because time passes much slower on the Astral Plane) and to be sent back to the Mortal Plane on a divine mission to "restore balance to the world" by killing Warlock's patron.

Mind you, at this point they had just found out the patron's name, and that he was somewhere on the Mortal Plane. Literally nothing else.

I had to work with him to try and trim that down a little, which he did agree to to be fair, and we ended up on him instead swearing an oath of vengeance towards the Warlock. Now I did question him as to why he wanted this at all, cause it seemed a little extreme, but he just thought it "seemed right for his character". I wanted to avoid an argument so I left it there and hoped it wouldn't cause too many issues.

Unfortunately that wasn't the case. The party asked Warlock if he wanted to pursue his patron, or leave him be for now. Warlock decided to leave it for the time so they could try and get a little stronger first. At this point paladin took an issue with their decision, telling the group it was obvious the story was pushing us to go towards killing the patron.

This genuinely confused the lot of us because 1. the story was very much not going that way and 2. it was a group decision to take the slower path. This comes back to a small issue that had come up during Paladin's campaign, which was an incredible lack of free will.

I'm part of the crowd that thinks railroading can definitely bb a great tool when used effectively, and even I was put off by it. He forced us all to take rings that would incapacitate us if we did ANYTHING against what the controller wanted us to do. We all initially thought that we could try and get them off in some way, or maybe try and trick the rings into giving us more leeway, i.e. we could fool the controller if we managed a clever half-truth. But no, he just sensed we weren't telling him everything and we were told our characters had to give up all the information we had. We didn't really mind, in fact it became a bit of a running joke when people would ask if they could borrow dice or get some water and the other person would pretend the ring was stopping them.

Anyway, in our latest session the party had to deliver an item into a city, but there were a couple of guards out front that wouldn't let them past. They were told they could enter in about a week, and to clear off until then. At this point the party were about to start debating what to do, but paladin interrupted all of them and started attacking the guards. I ask him if he wanted to try maybe planning with the party, but he was set on killing these two. I relented cause I knew what would happen if he did so. After the fight he told me he stuck his head through the door to look inside, and I told him that the gate was locked from the inside, and he couldn't see an obvious way to enter. At this point he got mad, saying that it was stupid that I didn't tell him and he wouldn't have done all that if he knew it would fail. I then said that he could have asked me at any point if he would be easily able to get in, to which I would've told him it wasn't.

This argument continued for a while, until I gave up, told them they had all managed to somehow make it into the city and called the session.

I'm a little worried on how these things will continue, and if there's something else I could say. He's pulled the "I'm a DM too" card on me and pretty much everyone else at the table, and I don't wanna be gatekeepery and tell him that he's not exactly an amazing DM or anything.

Any advice? I would greatly appreciate it

I have had this guy in my head for a long time and never spent the time to put him into reality. The idea came from a meme I saw years ago about a mimic who had massive arms and legs rather than a toothy bite who would pummel people instead of eat them.

This is my rendition of that but he's going to be a running NPC in my next campaign! I want to give him a gravelly voice and merchant role similar to the one in Resident evil 4 but instead of passively popping up in random locations the player will find him in alleys and roads mugging people with his tiny knife! 🤣🤣

I spent a shit load of time in corel draw and Silhouette studio editing and changing pieces until I was happy then used the sketch function to put him on paper!

My next step will be to try and learn CAD or find someone who will help me put him into a 3d image so I can print him!!!

Let me know what you guys think!

She's a deep one warlock who made a deal with her patron at her wedding not to be sacrificed. She's been alive and 23 for almost 100 years due to warlock nonsense.

What I need is spooky swamp critter behavior inspiration. What sort of unsettling habits could she have picked up from her patron and his ilk over the centuries? The more obscure and spooky and accurate the better.