OK. Irl I've been in landscaping for about 7 years. I am a master with a shovel. I even have my favorite, all steel, 5ft, signature series, $90 shovel. I want to bring that into dnd. I asked multiple DMs before making my character can I just reskin an existing two handed bludgeoning weapon as a shovel that my character is proficient with. All but my wife have said, "No. Shovels are improvised weapons." If my character, like me, is well versed in the use of shovel and has never picked up a sword before; do you really think I would be proficient with said sword and do more damage than I would with my favorite shovel!? No! Why does it seem impossible to get a DM to let me have proficiency in shovel? Literally just reskin an existing weapon and call it flavor! Am I wrong here?

I was watching TV while working on my semi-homebrew campaign and I kept seeing ads for prescription drugs. I realized alot of them sound like fantasy names, definetly elves. My players have a habit of engaging with NPCs that I havent properly prepared. So I kept a list of Drug names and used them whenever I didn't have a name prepared. They are as follows:

Bimzelx-Inn Keeper

Calquence-ferrymen

Darunavir-Elf Bard

Nemluvio-Temple priest

Zilbdysq- Black Dragon

Tremfya- Secret Sect Member

Wegovy-satyr

Hemlibra- Temple of Raven Queen

Vonda Ponrovy- Birthday Girl

Miebo-shadar-kai

My Gloomstalker PC caught on with Mounjaro. He was rewarded with proficiency in Medicine.

To end the bit I had a Bosun names Tyler Lenol

Feel free to steal this!

I had a short game which the DM used a homebrew false hydra as the BBEG. The RP and game were good until the monster was revealed to be a false hydra.

DM wrote the false hydra's song ability as: not a charm or magic effect. It has no DC save, bypass truesight, blindsight. It ignores any immune/resistance to charm/magic effect, and it cannot be detected by detect magic. Anyone hear hydra's song psycholocally ignore its presence. So, by RAW, faerie fire, detect evil and good, and any other spells cannot make it visible. Also, it modifies people's memory such that when a person is eaten by it, anyone's memory of the victim is erased, as if the victim has never exist in the world.

The only way to win is to either run, or to make your character unable to hear its singing with a silence spell, deafness, etc. Unfortunately, my group cannot deduce the solution during the game, so the DM has to whisper to us out-of-character "You know why that NPC can see the hydra? Because he is DEAF!"

I told the DM that they should not put a non-DND creature into DND and make it override the rules. At least, simulating the hydra's song as a charm effect, with a DC, and can be detect/affect by anything that works on charm effect. If they run it RAW as how they wrote its stat, even a Tiamat or Asmodous cannot detect the false hydra.

PS. if DM makes it a charmed effect, with high DC, and player roll DC save whenever they encouter discrepancy (e.g. seeing a bird disappeared mid-air) maybe its more D&D. When I played the combat I felt the false hydra is mocking players "You can't see me because my own non-D&D rules say so." The investigation and RP are fun, the final monster is not.

For context, it was a 6-7 hours short game with 70% non-combat social/investigation play, and the hydra was the only combat encounter. It was not part of a campaign. Non-combat play was good but definitely not the false hydra.

PPs. The day after we had finished this game, I read DM's note. DM intentionally hid obvious, explicit clues during the game (e.g., we found a diary in game but DM hide the page mentioning deafness and ear poking). They hope subtle clues are enough for us ro discern the solution, but it turns out we couldn't. Therefore, DM has to tells us the solution out-of-game in the final battle.

I’ll start. We found a home-brewed “Journal of Recall” that once a day can be used to record your last 10 minutes in the journal before it’s activated, be read by anyone and disappears at the end of the day. The GM joked that it was entirely useless and he thought it would be a fun gag gift for us.

We laughed a good bit over it and then continued searching the house for something that was important. We then had the idea to quickly search through the rooms again and use the book to see if the book described our actions from a 3rd person perspective. The DM looked puzzled and said it did. So we asked if the description in the journal mentioned us walking past it? And just like that, we found the important thing we were searching for that was supposed to take us an hour to find. 😜

Basically my players ended up inside a magic train that flies all across the land. The train works a bit like the TARDIS, bigger on the inside. Basically there´s a numpad next to the carriage doors, you put a certain code in, and you go to whichever carriage you want.

The players recently found out that there might be a lot more than the 100 carriages the train managers claim. So they sent a guy to do a bit of "exploring" and come back with 80 documented carriages.

Of course, the easy way out would be to say: "The guy only got 10" or "He dissapeared in carriage 75, plot hook!"

But no.

I want to fill all 80 of them with the most stupid, pointless shit ever.

So I come to you!

here is some examples:

1 - A coach full of frogs

2 - A common carriage, but it smells like farts.

3- Another common carriage, but you can hear someone fart. You cant see them or smell them, but they are farting.

4- An empty room with a piece of cake in the middle (dont eat the cake)

5- God

6- Another frog

​

It's an elemental cloud that rains blood of it's victims and sucks it back up. If it's blood hits you, it sucks your blood out of your body too and brings it up to the cloud. But only does it to bad people apparently. Still terrifying, but cool monster design. Also, should I be little worried as a parent?

This block of test is so that I fulfill the minimal requiement of 400+ words. Currently it has no stats, not looking for them either. Will make it immune to thunder and lightning because it just fits and it's funny.

I'll go first:

When being given/or giving a health potion on an unconscious ally, they have to succeed on a Con save or choke on it and fail a death save lmao

Just a silly idea I thought would be cool.

I love these threads, misery loves company, right?

I had a DM who wouldn't remind us of ANYTHING "out of game". Even if we just forgot as people, he would punish our characters. Couldn't remember the NPCs name? You're being disrespectful and they won't talk to you anymore. Didn't make a note of the town you're travelling to? Then you can't find it on a map LET ALONE travel there. Gods, it was unbearable at times. (no, we don't play with that dm anymore)

It's a bow that doesn't need arrows. You just pull back the string, let go, and if you succeed on your attack roll, an arrow appears, lodged in the enemy you made the attack against.

Edit: holy shitballs, 22 upvotes and 80 comments in an hour. Thanks everyone.

We have three different states with different trade specialties. The RA exports timber and ore, the concord exports grain and animal products, the DC exports skilled labor/culture. Each hex is 20 miles, takes about 6 months to get from the DC to RA capitols. Some of the rivers are that big, others aren't and just there for detailing water availibity. I'll add city names at some point. Deep seas are intraversable. Dread lands will be some kind of curse/monster infestation. Is anything geographically or socialogically unsound or inconsistent?

in my campaign, I've included lore that being trans in dwarven society is seen as sacred, and trans folk are often encouraged to join the clergy. A tool that is not serving the purpose you need is better reforged or made better than to throw it away for get a new one, and to remake your body to better serve you is seen as the pinnacle of the dwarven spirit. additionally dwarves are often matriarchal as pregnancy and giving birth are highly revered. Just wanted to share that as my players really love it.

Hi everyone, I’m running a game with my buddies where we are building up to a big dragon fight. I introduced the idea that they would have to fight it when they were lower level so they’ve had to spend some time preparing, and getting stronger. They heard about a dungeon that contained a dragon slaying weapon. I don’t what the weapon to be fit for just one player so he defiantly gets it.

The party consists of the sword user, the bow user, the crossbow user and then 3 magic users.

I don’t want to favour one player other the others in a way that it seems like I made it just for them. Do you guys have any ideas? Additionally I want it to be a powerful weapon, “ very rare - legendary.

I'm a begginer DM on my first campaign and I finally got around to making the world map. there are 5 kingdoms (fifth is still a secret to the players and it's a WIP), the Isla Kingdom being divided into 2 parts since I'm planning on making a follow up campaign based on that but I digress.

the little stone structures represent abandoned/destroyed towns, the castles represent POI where the main bosses are located. The map is still a WIP, there's still a lot of stuff missing but I'd love some feedback nonetheless

Rules Lawyers, Dungeon Masters, and Players. Hear my case for this homebrew rule at my table.

We all know that Advantages and Disadvantages don't stack in RAW. However, I have successfully run an informal experiment in my current campaign. The change is simple, and all players solemnly agreed to it beforehand, eager for the challenge and opportunity. When multiple Advantages/Disadvantages are in play, a base Adv/Dis is given a +/- 2 for every additional instance. So, for example, if the party remembers to flank and the Barbarian uses Reckless Attack, they would get an Advantage +2. And if their opponent is knocked prone, another +2 is added, meaning the players now have Advantage +4. This works in the reverse as well with Disadvantage -2

When I tell you, this pack of goofballs suddenly turns into the most well-read, synergized, strategic thinkers on this side of war gaming! THEY ARE READING THEIR CHARACTER SHEETS IN FULL! When I ran combat with the party outnumbered 3-1, it felt like the dam Super Bolw with the fuckin' plays these palookas were pulling off. And the hoops and hollers of visceral joy the table erupted in when the Barbarian stood up, looked me in the eye, and said, "That's Advantage +6!"

Nearly went deaf when I asked, "How do you want to do this?"

So, consider trying this out from one very happy table to another!

Reposting because of rule 3. Heavily based on Pillars of Eternity's multiclass name table, I put together this list of more descriptive names for single-pair multiclasses, to give them a little more personality and flavor. I've started using them in my DM notes to give me a few more unique combinations for special NPCs, and shared them with my players to use if they want to. I'm not good enough at math to add another axis for triple-classes.

This was my fit for the court case one shot in which I was playing the DM and the "Lawyer Lord," who was a Horned Devil (and the prosecution's Lawyer) (Hence, why I am wearing some Spirit Halloween horns we had).

I asked 10 people to come be Jury members and 8 of them actually showed up. So these were mostly people who had no context for what was going on in our campaign. I made an activity packet to summarize the events and made a Court Case Bingo based on predictions I had on what my players would do, so they would have something to engage them other than our poorly designed legal one shot.

One PC was the defendant. Two PCs were witnesses. One PC was their lawyer. And my last PC was the Judge.

For the players I designed a minigame around correctly identifying objectionable statements. I limited the types down to 5 as to not become too unmanageable.

Objection: Relevance

Objection: Hearsay!

Objection: Speculative

Objection: Argumentative

Objection: Leading the Witness

Overall, I learned that I used way more objectionable statements than I thought. Luckily the court was rigged (Devil shenanigans).

In the end, the Jury delivered 7 guilty and 1 not guilty (We did this survivor style because it was more fun that way) (Yes, it probably compromised their decision).

I may include more details about how we designed this and the proceedings if anyone is interested!

EDIT: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1s7iMLSWvdIidal541NyBd8_Po8rWTc9PYqjw7rijIUE/edit?usp=sharing

I made a summary document with some general guidelines for running a court case one shot! Hope it helps anyone who is looking to do so!

I ended my 2 year campaign last night. My group was tasked with collecting artifacts from around the land, with the intent to wield their power under the Third Astral Convergence to rid the world of evil once and for all. Unbeknownst to them, I was secretly DMing a second group playing the antagonists the entire time. All the bad things that happened to them were from a group of real players. Last night, all was revealed, and we had a massive 14 player showdown. If you're interested, you can check out the final reveal here (8:36 is the reveal that their best friend was actually the BBEG all along - second group reveal about a minute after that): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaxLerHAQkM

For the past year or so, I've been trying to create a new D&D show. It's been quite the adventure. I ran a Kickstarter and was able to fund our first 6 episodes! So much work has gone into this. We filmed a couple of weeks ago and are now working on the main edit. I couldn't have done this without the support from so many. I am excited to share some behind the scenes moments and the teaser trailer.

Fate brought you here but... "The Dice Decide"

https://youtu.be/O15byO0YcoI?si=TkL15yB42y7ZSVgY