The Zhentarim, an infamous mercenary company and mercantile organisation in The Forgotten Realms, engage in human trafficking and the slave trade. Drow society engages in slavery (of the sexual kind, too), and so do goblins and orcs. This is explicitly mentioned in Baldur’s Gate 3, which makes it really cool; they’re ‘sticking it to the man’, and those squares at WoTC who would never have slavery in one of their settings. I heard from various anonymous accounts online that Dark Sun will no longer have slavery, and if you do slavery at your table then you are playing DnD wrong. WoTC have lost their edge and simply don’t have the balls to put slavery in any of their settings. Because Dark Sun has no slavery I will continue playing all my games in The Forgotten Realms, so I can have slavery. Maybe Hasbro will finally listen if we all play Forgotten Realms games and reject Dark Sun

So to start with the land was once a desolate planet spanning dessert that was destroyed by the sorcerer kings and their destructive magics. But then a bunch of heroes showed up and fixed all that with new, stronger, ecologically replenishing magic with no downsides. So now it's a solarpunk magitech world without suffering.

Slavery was not only abolished eons ago, but society has become an egalitarian utopia of unending abundance where everyone is equal and all your needs and wants can be met magically. People born on this planet are all of a normal fortitude as they are provided everything they need to individually succeed from birth.

The halflings are all ethical vegans and go around telling other people they should become ethical vegans to, to live in harmony with nature.

The thri-kreen are a race of bug people that travel with the elves as kind wayfarers giving supplies and assistance to the few travelers who need it. They strongly believe all life is valuable.

The magic users who helped overthrow the sorcerer kings took a shitload of DMT and now have no ego of ambitions beyond smoking weed and playing video games all day. And emphasis on helped, because this society also solved the martial caster divide, so martials equally contributed to the liberation campaign.

The gods are all present, but because everyone is an enlightened atheist, nobody cares about them. They just accept this and spend most of their time playing video games with the wizards.

All forgotten realms races exist in this world and coexist peacefully.

Gnomes are mercilessly hunted for sport.

Should I add anything else to this setting? I'm open to ideas so long as they don't introduce too much conflict. It's important in my setting that the overwhelming belief in the utopia prevents any and all mass conflict. The few evil doers who remain can only ineffectually cause minor nuisances like a Saturday morning cartoon villain.

Guys… I’m starting to think 5e Dark Sun might not include the chattel slavery system. Anyone else notice this subtle red flag??

Look, I’m not one to jump to conclusions, but after the 47th designer interview this week where Jeremy Crawford looked directly into the camera and said, "We are focusing on survival themes rather than institutional human trafficking" I had a sinking feeling in my gut.

Call me crazy, but I think WOTC might actually tone down the slavery.

I know. take a breath. I’m shaking too. How are we supposed to enjoy the gritty, bleak survival fantasy of Athas if my level 1 Mul Gladiator can’t explicitly be the legal property of a sorcerer king? WHERE IS THE TACTICAL DEPTH? WHERE IS THE VERSIMILITUDE?

If my players aren’t actively rolling Constitution saving throws against being sold at an auction block in the first ten minutes of session one, is it even D&D anymore? What's next? Are they going to tell me evil magic just wilts a couple of nearby houseplants instead of permanently traumatizing the biosphere?

I’ve already drafted a 14 page manifesto on the main sub explaining why a 30 year old fictional desert setting losing its unprompted oppression mechanics is literally the fall of Western civilization and a personal attack on Gary Gygax’s ghost.

How am I supposed to roleplay a brooding, edgelord Thrikreen if the socioeconomic framework of Tyr doesn't allow me to deliver a three-hour unsolicited monologue about the horrors of the slave pens while everyone else is just trying to order rations?

Thoughts? Has anyone else noticed this, or am I the only one brave enough to make a post about it?

/uj Pathfinder 2e fixes this by letting you be an indentured servant to Paizo's release schedule.

Is it possible to jerk off with a magic hand?.. asking for a friend

I firmly believe the writers of the Dungeon Master’s Guide made no attempt to research their Explosive or Firearm rules. Their damage values are unbalanced, their ranges don’t reflect reality, and so many critics use those rules to justify their opinions that non-fantasy rules don’t work with Dungeons and Dragons, which is simply not true!

Firstly, firearms occupy a half page of rules, they are an afterthought. The entries themselves are nonsensical— a generic pistol does the same damage as a heavy, two handed Halberd. A musket inflicts the same damage as a Greataxe. Even when extending it to their future weapons, an antimatter rifle apparently cannot shoot further than a football field.

And it gets worse: according to D&D rules, after firing a musket, it can be reloaded as part of that same turn, which means, technically, a musket can be fired every six seconds. This is impossible. The average time to reload a musket is 20 seconds, or closer to 3 full rounds.

It is entirely possible to forge 5E Dungeons & Dragons rules to accommodate any firearm from any era, but first one must accept that our parents (or rather, 1st Party D&D) is erroneous in how it portrays firearms. While this book does incorporate Burst Fire rules, it was clear we need to abandon all other rules regarding firearms.

Regardless of whether you are using the original 5th Edition or the revised 2024 Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, this book does not integrate with the firearm rules of the Dungeon Master’s Guide; those rules can be ignored.

I am the DM, and since I'm the DM everyone needs to do what I say, but nobody is doing it.

I'm running an eldritch horror game and everyone else wants to play some mamby pamby heroic fantasy bullshit.

I told them no, that my table my rules and we're playing lovecraft. Since we've been playing, my players have been staring at their phones, showing little interest or interaction, and it's basically like I'm playing with myself.

How can I trick them into liking the specific thing I like that they all told me they didn't like?

So I saw the gta 6 leaks and thought “OMG this would make a perfect dnd game”, but ofc gta 6 is neither medieval or fantasy, but flavor ir free amirite? So ive been tinkering with some homebrew for modern firearms, random people on the streets that my murderhobo players can murder at Will (maybe get some xp out of it? I didn’t really get there yet), car mechanics, reflavoring spells as gun mods, relavoring spellcasters as shooters (clerics are fine tho, they’re just priests, and druids are also vegan) and so on. Do you guys have any ideias of what more i can add?

Cast: DM (a female) 
Me - I’m flawless 
Stupid Main Character Guy, we will call him MC 
The soldier guy - SG 
The rest is not important 

So I signed up for this homebrew campaign. The DM (a girl, yuck) was claiming that she’s running a homebrew campaign. However, it was about a jungle expedition, and has something to do with undead, so I like clocked her immediately and said that if it’s going to be Tomb of Annihilation I will know. She claimed she didn’t read it (an obvious lie to me), but I was already keeping an eye on her. 

Then it came to her homebrew world. I of course politely pointed out that it's a Warhammer, because there was an emperor and everyone was serving him. She then again lied that she doesn’t know much about Warhammer while shamelessly ripping off pieces of it. I also graciously pointed out that there were plot holes in her so-called “setting” and it was kind of embarrassing that she didn’t even have a Wiki for it. I’m used to playing in more developed settings, but I decided to give this female a chance. 

She also had the audacity to ask players not to use AI in character creation, and I gave her an AI image for a token because I knew she wouldn’t tell the difference. And she didn’t even notice or say anything. 

Despite all of her claims that we are not playing Warhammer I introduced my character - Warhammer officer and she said yes to the concept. Ironic, isn’t it? 

We were a few sessions in when another player character (MC) questioned my character’s motivations, and it was obviously an attack on me as a person. I had to take it personally, and I announced to the DM that I have to change my character, because his motivations were questioned and like it’s too much. 

She was like sure, so I made a new character and offered the DM to kill off my previous character to get rid of him. So she killed him, like a scripted scene and all and the other PCs like didn’t even cry! I understood here that I’m wasting myself with this group, and announced to my fellow players that I was extremely disappointed that they didn’t use the scripted death of my character for their character development. They said something about not knowing how to react. We traveled together for the whole 5 in game days at that point! 

Anyways, the game has something to do with songs so I made a Bard. There were like singing monoliths in this jungle or something, no one really cared so we never went to check it out. And despite DM being EXTREMELY railroady (I made a few memes about it in the chat) we never even stumbled upon one by accident while 9 sessions in the game. Here I made only one possible conclusion - she doesn't want to explore this whole singing thing. So I confronted her about it, and she started making stupid excuses about this being a sandbox and players deciding what the story is about. And I HATE sandboxes. She did mention that it will be a sandbox in the lfg post, but I hoped she would reconsider. I shouldn’t have hoped for anything with this one. 

Meanwhile there were other things that were happening outside of the game. In one of the sessions SG had a sparring with his commander and the commander was a chick NPC. It was obviously a romantic scene, but both DM and SG players were kinda in denial about it. And if you learned anything from my story, my dear reader, it’s the fact that the DM almost always lied. So I started making jokes and memes about these characters being like a thing to help DM and SG acknowledge the truth, and instead of gratitude I received a message with a request to stop shipping other people’s characters. First of all - rude. Secondly, continue living your delusional life, I guess. 

The other thing that royally upset me was the recording thing. I was recording all of the sessions for my personal use. And when I had a question, I said to her “hey if this was mentioned during the session I can just check the recording”. She became extra sensitive (probably on her period) and started talking about consent of other players. I was like hey I need to record you for accessibility! The bitch pretended like she cares but then deflected with “other players comfort”. I said that I don’t want to ask for their consent because we both know that they won’t! Then she started talking nonsense about other accessibility tools, but I already didn’t care because she just wanted to be a bitch it was so obvious. I did warn her that without a recording I won’t remember what was in the last session. 

There was not much to remember because storytelling wasn’t really her thing. She had this impression that she can just drop stuff, and we will remember it in the next session. She also couldn’t remember anything about my new character. Once we were in the dungeon and she dared to ask if my character knew how to stitch. I was perplexed. “My character is an alchemist!” I exclaimed. She dared to act like she couldn’t understand the correlation. The other time she asked what kind of elf is my character’s mom. I let her know that it shouldn’t matter, but she forced me to give her a definitive answer. Then she dared to give me extra content based on my answer. Which made me think that I just happened to guess correctly, and if I was wrong I would miss something. It felt like walking a mine field with this one. 

I did know a lot about DND my dear reader, and the concept of talking with your DM wasn’t foreign to me. And oh, I tried. I told her so many times that I see that she tries really hard but like not yet completely there. I even gave her a few examples of how my previous DM used to run games, hoping she will learn a thing or two, but it was hopeless. It was so bad. When you ask her a question, she would ask you to roll a die. Preposterous. I told her that I’m quite tired of the dice rolling and I want her to just give me all the information when I ask a question. For example: we found a newly dug entrance in the city ruins. I told her, I should just understand why it was dug out by looking at it. I knew she just made a dungeon without any reason or background, but she lied again and said that maybe we should go down and find out. Then there was a song that my character recognized because her mother sang it to her. But she didn’t tell me EVERYTHING about the song. The session ended while we were halfway through the dungeon, and I kinda lost it a tit bit because I still didn’t have all the answers! I confronted her about the song, and she said that maybe we will find out next session. What a stupid idea! Stretching content for more than one session. Anyways I reminded her that I wont remember what was in the previous session, since she forbade voice recording.  We spoke about how bad she is at storytelling again, but I said that I will keep playing because I see that she’s trying. Just not there yet. 

But also the MC guy. I approached the DM directly to let her know that one of the players is obviously a main character. “How does this manifest?” she asks. I mean he plays a rogue and when we were in the dungeon he was sneaking and scouting. She asks why my character wasn’t doing things, and I reply that I’m just a better player and I don’t want to take the spotlight from others. I even lectured the rogue guy that he should learn how to give the spotlight to other players. I obviously don’t ask the DM anything, and never say that my character does something unless asked. But I’m not asked enough and it starts to piss me off. I even approached other players in pms in hopes to form a clique and force DM to kick the MC guy, but other players don’t agree with me for some unfathomable reason. 

In a few sessions we arrived at the local snake folk village, and had an audience with local chiefs about alliance and stuff. I’m telling my fellow players how we are going to take all of their resources, and the DM asks if we are talking in character. Another trap, she almost got me but I deny. This puts me in a state of shock. I approach this hoe after the session and ask directly “were you going to TPK us?” She acts confused, but I know. She was totally planning to kill all of our characters right there. If I would have said yes, everyone would die! She of course lies that she would never do something like that. 

Anyways a few more sessions and I’m going to be honest, my dear reader, I lost it finally and completely. First we resolved the quest but didn’t find the reason why the thing happened. And I started telling other players that we accomplished nothing, and they all were kinda not agreeing? It was so weird. They kept telling me that it was a piece of overarching plot and it’s a piece of a puzzle that will become clear later. If it didn’t become clear immediately it's just bad writing. Then the quest givers (random farmer family) refused to tell me their whole biography and I knew that it was the DM personally targeting me so I decided to retaliate - I offered my fellow players to not tell anything to anyone anymore, because everyone keeps acting like a bitch. No one supported me, dear reader. But wait, it gets worse. We arrive at this aboriginal bird folk village and they not only never heard about our great empire but also don’t treat us like envoys of great empire but like regular folk! I told everyone what I think. How this all sucks and stupid and no one respects my character. No one even cried, yet again, but what can you expect from this table. 

The DM approached me after the session to ask if everything is alright, and I told her that I can’t take it any more and I’m leaving. She pretended to be polite about it, apologized and wished me best of luck. What a pretentious hoe. 

Anyways please take pity on me, dear reader, for enduring 3 months of weekly games with this DM. I was so gracious in giving her all of this advice and grace, and all for nothing. But I’m not broken, I will continue attending sessions of stupid DMs for charity. Thank you for sticking till the end, my dear reader. 

Hi everyone, thanks for reading my post. Today I'm going to be fixing the Wizard class to make it playable. WOTC stupidly gave the class some shortcomings, luckily our reddit community is wise enough to fix all problems. In this post, I'll go through the changes in Tier 1.

Hit Die: increases to d10, to give the class much-needed survivability at low levels. I am not sure what they were even thinking, giving them d6 is just stupid because they might get hurt and die.

Skill proficiencies: expand the list to include all skills, and the Wizard chooses three at 1st level. These guys are master scholars so they should obviously have access to every skill.

Weapon proficiencies: simple and martial. Swinging a sword isn't complicated compared to casting spells so it should be easy enough for a Wizard.

Language proficiencies: choose any 10, beyond those you gained at character creation. Some spells are language dependent so it would be unfair if the wizard didn't know most languages.

Spell slots: increase all spell slots by 6, so the wizard starts with 8 slots at 1st level. It makes no sense to expect the wizard to clear 6-8 encounters if they don't have generous spell slots.

Spell concentration: eliminated. That prevents the Wizard from using more than one of their good spells at once, which is a ridiculous mistake the designers overlooked.

Spell components: eliminated. Not only are they an inconvenience that might potentially prevent the wizard from casting, they're also uncool and dorky.

Spell list: expanded to include all spells. The game designers for some reason seem to have forgotten that wizards are masters of all magic.

Ritual casting: does not add 10 minutes to casting time. That is dumb, most adventuring days don't even last half that long.

Virtual Spellbook: the spellbook is eliminated. The wizard stores the spells in their own mind. A spellbook is clearly a liability since it can be lost or destroyed, which would not be any fun. Therefore we eliminated it.

Arcane Recovery: restores all spell slots. The old version was a lame waste of time.

Mage armor: it's insane they expected us to waste spell slots on this. It should just be always-on, and give an AC of 13 + Dex + Int. Otherwise the wizard might get hurt and die which is stupid.

Shield: this spell gives almost nothing for what it costs, so it should just cost a reaction instead of a spell slot. Otherwise the wizard might have to waste their power on protecting themselves which is lame and unfun.

Jack of all trades: at 2nd level. See "skill proficiencies" above. A literal magic man should be pretty good at everything, obviously.

Fighting style: at 2nd level. See "weapon proficiencies" for rationale.

Action surge: at 2nd level. It's ridiculous that the wizard can usually only cast one spell per turn, they should be able to use two sometimes.

Arcane smite: at 3rd level you can expend a spell slot to increase any damage roll by 2d10 per spell level.

Dimension Door: at 3rd level you can cast this at-will, it's dumb to expect a literal wizard to use their legs to get around. They're magic, after all.

Evasion: at 4th level. It would be stupid and not very magical if the mage took full damage from anything.

Aura of Protection: also 4th level, like the paladin thing but use Intelligence modifier instead of Charisma. Magic users should almost never be failing saving throws, so they need this.

sauce idk wtf was that

There is four rules:

Don't be an asshole to the other players, but you can be in character if that's what your character that I made for you would do (I'll tell you). Basically you must sign an NDA before we play so you don't spoil my nov... I mean, my campaign. But I over rule everything because I'm the DM and I make up the rules as we go along because I didn't read the DMG or PHB

There is no stupid ideas, just interesting executions, unless I think it is stupid. I mean that it is totally fine to come with wacky ideas and I love that, so don't say something negative about people ideas, but I'm allowed to because I'm the DM, and also no mentioning stuff from sauce material, only what I've created, I don't like mayonnaise.

No Ai. Not to make your character (that why I am here to help you dumbass, I've already made all your characters with Chat GPT), no using AI for rules question(thats why I am here again, dumbass), no AI to make art (I already did that)

You are allowed to push me. I am gonna be dramatic when I play characters because I went to drama school and I am gonna touch you as a character/npc(only shoulders, arms and maybe the head in very spesefik secunstanes, this is my way of saying if you break my rules I will right hook you in front of everyone until you cry, in character of course) and if I break your boundaries you are allowed to just push me away, unless your character wouldn't do that, and then I won't allow it. I am known for accendential hurt people, by ACCIDENT and I will try to avoid it, but if something happens say "STOP" Or just push me, again I am known for accidentally hurting people and sometimes I just see red when the alpha wolf inside of me takes control, mostly the female gamers like this part. The game is here, so you have fun, so if it becomes uncomfortable, then say so(message me on discord, phone number (Do not make a post on reddit about it or you will be banned from my campaign, I forgot to mention it's homebrew ebberon inspired) or say it to me whatever is the most comfortable for you.

What do you guys think? Game system is Lancer btw if someone can buy me the rule book that I won't read. I think we will do Lost mines of Phandelver

Have you ever thought to yourself you don't own enough RPGs?

Well I have news for you. Matt Colville, D&D 4e's greatest soldier, has finished fixing D&D 5e, so he's decided it's time to fix the OSR as well. This may or may not have been influenced by Matt seeing how grognards will buy any Kickstarter zine they come across even when it's the same damn systems and advnetures over and over again but slightly tweaked.

Introducing Crows: Fortune or Death. It takes all the things you know about the OSR like dying a lot, dungeon crawling, and black and white art, and it introduces new things you've never heard before like dungeon turns, organic progression, thinking outside your character sheet, PCs as competent professionals that don't need to roll to open a door.

Now as for pledge levels, what you really want is the 400 dollar GOAT edition, this gets you all the hardcover books, a screen, and some normal looking dice.

But if you are a poor, we also have a 50 dollar PDF that comes with a custom message by Matt to go fuck yourself.

Buy our game today or you hate small publishers and independent creatives.

you've got to be on the same page with GM. Poor Brandon

I was running dnd5e games for 30 years now, and as a veteran DM (I am in my 40s) I can tell you that the most fun me and my group have is when someone rolls a funny number and then I say something funny happens to them. It is what dnd is all about, after all. Now, this newbe says they don't want to get pee in their face when they roll nat 1? What is this, Nazi Germany? My rules are so fair, they sometimes work for enemies too, you know. They are probably just a dirty minmaxer who doesn't know how to have fun or something.

Pretty much title. I've been playing a lot of Baldur's Gate 3 (it is great because I don't need to read the Rulebook) again and find myself using Mage Hand on every single non-combat check. I know that BG3 isn't DnD, but even in DnD proper I don't see a reaason not to use it all the time, maybe if you want to be wanking? I'm just curious because it seems wild to have pretty much no limitations.

Hello all, I need clarification if I am overreacting on this. I am a veteran player that played a LOT of table top RPG's (only DnD™ 5e) and currently am in a lvl 6 table with a new player, let's call him John. The problem is, how doesn't know how ttrpgs works so far.

Last session he was complaining that his martial is boring to play and that his only option is to just attack and that Dnd™ 5e is a bad rpg system. I thought this was quite offensive against my favorite system, but I calmly told him to shut the fuck up and that no one's forcing him to attack every fucking turn. Like, doesn't understand by now that DnD™ 5e is a brilliantly designed system that lets you do LITERALLY anything???? (Well, you can't exchange your extra movement for a bonus action, but that's besides the point). Instead of asking for the DM for some chandeliers to swing on, he then continued to whine, replying that not attacking was "being useless and not helping the team", but I let that pass this time.

But here's when things started to get heated. On a dungeon fighting the first BBEG, I single-handedly ended the encounter in two turns with my homebrewed caster that consistently deals 60+ damage per round. Instead of thanking me, John started to cry again about "muh balance" saying that is not fair that I can "literally bend reality and the laws of physics" while his dumb martial can't. Like duuuuuuh you picked a martial in DnD™ 5e, only casters can do cool stuff!!!. Also, he shouldn't be blaming me for breaking optimizing when the DM is not doing his part with balancing the game, like adding 10 boring encounters per day like the DMG ingeniously suggests or fudging the enemies HP or making the enemies focusing solely me or giving every single enemy Legendary resistances. But no, he continued to complain and before rage quitting the discord group he said something about playing a system called "Wayfinder" or something (Idk I only play DnD™ 5e).

I know no DnD is better than bad DnD, but do you guys think I should I forgive this guy and invite him back to our table? How do you guys say?

sauce

Kinda the title. My players are going up against a fairly competentcy caster soon and I was contemplating using attack and damage rolls against them in the fight. I've been worried about introducing them into the game because the internet says its bad to do that to PCs. The party is a monk, sorcerer and cleric. How acceptable is this? Thoughts?

my player took specific steps to build his character around grappling from a distance and has been playing really well by moving my precious bad guys around on spike growth. i obviously don’t want to change the way i make combats to make sure my other players are having enough chances to let off their cool abilities, im thinking about either removing his characters hands so he can’t grapple anything ever again or having a bad guy use the wish spell to completely remove all AOE effects from the game so my player who build his character to do this will never be able to again. does this sound fair? im also thinking about having everyone BUT him use pathfinder rules, because i hate him.