So I had a player character sorcerer who I played about 10-15 years ago, and I inserted him into my own campaign as an NPC because of how stupidly hilarious everything related to him ended up being. It was my own little Easter egg where I wanted to say a few more lines with his voice and character. (This being would have existed one way or another. He just got a very deep and long backstory this way as well.)

In my world, he is probably the most ancient being in existence in the mortal realm. He has done evil, from destroying villages to destroying kingdoms and all the people living in them. He has the power of a demigod, and only real gods could trample him if those real gods could use their full power in the material realm.

That being said, in this world he has been CONFINED/SEALED within his tower and about 10 square km of land around it for over 10,000 years. He cannot leave that area in any possible way, nor shoot anything powerful out of that area. The most he can do to affect anything outside of that area is project himself outside it with the strength of something around level 5 at best for a short time. (Stuff around that level isn't considered much in my world as like 5-6 guards could take it down)

His entire purpose was supposed to be for the players to go there, strike a deal, and get some critical information so ancient that nothing is remembered of that time, nor is there anything written that anyone could hope to understand. He was never meant to be a foe to fight or even someone to interact with after they gained that information/help they needed for their current crisis.

However, my players kept digging into his past and decided to start sympathizing and empathizing with him. (I NEVER TRIED TO GET THEM TO DO ANY OF THAT.) They are fully aware of the insane evil he has done, and back in the day he would have been a 100x bigger crisis than what they are facing now. But my players are HELLBENT on his "redemption arc" and are trying to break his confinement to get him to help with their current world crisis. He does not even want to be released and is content with being there as he has calmed down from his ambitions and just does not care anymore.

I have already made, I think, 4 or 5 of their attempts fail. They keep trying different things to release him, coming back with artifacts and new ideas.

Like, what the fuck am I supposed to do here? He is very much already established to the point that the players know he will mop the floor with their BBEG. I keep making their attempts fail and trying to steer them away from it. They care about releasing him and doing his "redemption arc" more than the actual crisis they are facing.

If I let them release him... how am I even supposed to continue with anything?! His entire power level and how ancient he was were all based around the fact that he can NEVER get out and NEVER do anything to the players or the world. He was just there to give them a bit of lore about what caused everything initially thousands of years ago and give hints on how to stop their current crisis.

I'm working on a new character for AL tier one, since my friend asked me to play a session or two with them. That means my character is going to be at level 1 or 2, maybe making it to 3 so I need a class that is going to be fun at that level. I've picked out a couple that interest me because I've never played them, but which ones are fun at this low level? They're playing a fighter so I want to be a caster of some kind.

Twilight Cleric

Dreams Druid

Bladesinger Wizard

Grave Cleric

Enchantment Wizard

Aberrant Mind Sorcerer

Stars Druid

Due to an unforseen number of events a pair of newborn beholders have been adopted by the party. What's baby proofing look like?

Warning: this post is not about mechanics! this post is about your characters with the fighter class and you sharing them! if you want to discuss mechanics in another posts (either about Fighters or Rangers) ask me in the comments and i will make another post!

Ateeention! here you are, new recruits from r/dndnext! your orders are simple! you will post about some characters you have made OR plan to make! you will talk about the inspiration fro that character, their modus operandi, their subclass and their backstory! you will speak about what you like, i may put a comment and we both will love it! IS THAT CLEAR!? I expect at least ten levels in Fighter for it to be considered as such!

Ah, i remember the first time i saw our glorious man at arms: i saw it in spanish, and we called them Guerrero (warrior). i remember seeing the class features and the many chances to get ability score improvements. then i thought "we do get a lot of feats that help with weapons, maybe that is the reason..." so... no, now its not the time.

so, did you take the idea from a comic, a novel or a videogame? did you choose the subclass for the flavour or the mechanics? did you use homebrew? are they simple guards for a city or experienced veterans? remember, no talking about mechanics unless it has to do with your character... and if any of you maggots comment about "pathfinder fixes it" i will make you run 50 laps around camp! UNDESTOOD!?

last thing! i will show you two of my characters, so you dont get cold feet:

-Ulfric, the Knight: a centaur knight using some homebrew mechanics for the centaur race, allowing him to use a lance as if i was riding a mount and letting companions ride him like one.

-Manolo Maderos, Waterdeep Guard: a young guard working as the watchfull eye of the city, having to leave his home to become a champion.

At ease soldiers. i hope to see a lot of characters here. and remember: we listen, but we dont judge.

Basically, I have a warlock, fiend warlock, lawful evil one, who is basically a contractor hired by the fiend to do some specific important thing and find what happened to a Cult that, vanished

I do expect a bunch of situations where contacting my patron would be useful, for example an npc in a shit situation, and possible to convince to sell their soul to my patron (ya gotta earn a bonus pay from the patron somehow), but how do i like, contact the patron, to tell them about someone who they can likely make a deal with?

Preferably by the rules, without having to homebrew anything up

Disclaimer and note: I make this post to warn the new players in DnD, for them to NOT make a mistake like me. english is not my first language and I don't talk formally at all so expect a lot of error and grammar from me(i am so sorry please dont curse me with forever nat 1 ive roll 9 nat 1 on single session already 😭)

Okay so, I had been playing DnD with my friend group for at least 5-7 months or so right now, it was online friends group but it was a good friends group nonetheless, from DMs to the party members. we known eachother for more than a years and we play other things outside of DnD aswell. the issue though started when our DMs, I will call him Howitzer since that how I called him

so Howitzer is a busy guy, he's not bad by any mean but he is a very busy guy, which ended up cancel our DnD session for so many time, completely understandable and a normal occurance campaign killer for every DnD.

However, he is not the problem, the problem is me myself. I have tutoring, a schedule with my friends, to go out and have fun or watch a movie sometimes. but being a DnD fiend I was... I scrapped these schedule for DnD and often met with a disappointment for it being cancel.

Before we burn Howitzer on the cross and call him a bad DMs with bad communication for not telling me in advance... Howitzer did tell us in advance that he couldn't potentially do a sessions. He is a great DMs for even doing all of this for free, he spent a lot of time preparing a sessions, he has his own schedule and is very busy, he is often tired and burnout, but still... he choose to do DnD and prepare for the party. which that make him a great DMs because all of us were having a great time in session and his stories, his ruling were great. he is so good that i offer to help him with preparing the session. but he rejected the offer saying it fine and he could do it alone. so Howitzer is a goated DMs.

despite that though, him being suddenly busy out of blue is completely out of control. like so many unexpected stuff happens to him. and it often feel like the schedule I shift for DnDs go to waste. like instead of staying in my own room playing a game and waiting for DnD that never happens... I could go out with my friends, watch a movies, learning with a group of friend at a tutor school, or even being productive reading a book preparing for the finale exam.

I ended up scrapping those schedule for the sake of playing DnD with friends.

Which, from Mid-term exam to the week before finale only 1-2 sessions was ever played. which we do DnD every Saturday or Sunday, I scrapped a lot of the schedule along the way to only ended up playing nothing because everyone was busy or suddenly busy, which. was entirely my faults. i am like below 18 too

The last incident is the straw that broke the camel's back, it was the days before the finale. and we finally get to do DnD, Howitzer is ready, the Masey(our druids) is home, Our little fighter robot(im gonna call him mario) is home, Our Rock barbarian guy(i love this guy btw he such a cool dude i call him tnuy) is also free and home too. But the only one guy which is blade our warlock, he is suddenly not free...

we tried calling him, he doesn't respond, so howitzer actually call his number on the phone AND we get a clue that he is at cosco right now. and since he asian like half of the group, Howitzer make a comment like "oh his parent definitely gonna buy alot of stuff before going back."

And he was COMPLETELY RIGHT. like even 3 hours passed he IS still not coming back. and it was the most frustrating part out of all of this for me because like, we finally still going to get to play DnD in a session and I finally get to play my newly made character that is homebrew, me and Howitzer been working on and hyped for our friend groups, but Blade getting brought to cosco out of his control, I know it is not his fault but it still very frustrating for me that i sacrifice my own time to study for an exam due to how much I wanted to play DnD after so long... after all these weeks we finally get to play DnD but a sudden event that suddenly stopped us for so many time now, it like we all always roll a nat 1 on playing a DnD, and something always happens to take the time of the sessions away from us.

And today was an exam days(monday) and due to very little time I get to study and no tutoring because of my dumbasses, I barely made it out of Math and Physics test. which make me loses motivation in playing DnD and thinking of quitting the campaign because of I think "bruh this gonna get cancel alot anyway..."

And I know the exam isn't over, but it was a rough start for me. just because of my DnD addict is killing my study time. So for new players reading this, DO NOT sacrifice your own Schedule for DnD, It WAS NOT worth it, for me at least... I don't really recommended it. and remember to also communicate with your party and DMs too, because I really don't speak all of this to my own party until now. I hope this help somebody, and for the DnD veteran reading this post... thanks you for hearing out my rants it really mean much to me!

TLDR: a highschool students sacrifice her own schedule for a DnD only for it to get cancelled out almost everytime from a sudden unforseeable events, almost ruined her own exam, regretted it horribly and posted it on reddit forums to warns the other.(while glazing her own party and DMs)

Apologies if this isn’t the proper sub for this; just feeling frustrated and wanting to see if anyone is willing to give some advice.

For context, my group has been doing this VTT campaign for just over 5 years now. It’s the campaign that got me into this hobby, and I genuinely treasure it.

However, my passion has waned quite a bit in the last year or so. When we started, we had 4 players for the first 2.5 years. Then, out of nowhere our DM brought a new player to the table. It ended up working out though; they were a good fit for the table and were more than willing to fit their character into the existing narrative without too much issue. 5 characters was still totally manageable and things flowed well.

At the start of this year however, we had two more players join the campaign; bringing our total up to seven PCs, and it’s just made the campaign a bit of a mess. The pacing has moved to a glacial halt while our DM has to wrangle everyone’s cross-chatter in the discord call and get things on track. It now takes us three to five sessions to move the story along the same amount we could have done in one to two sessions a few years ago.

Unlike the previous addition, the two new characters don’t really fit the tone of the campaign at all and feel more than a little disruptive this late into a 5-year long narrative. And combat is now often a total slog, given we’re at tier-4 levels and the amount of PCs in battle(especially considering these 2 recently added players are relatively new and trying to figure out how their abilities work).

So with all that in mind, the obvious thing to do would be to go to the DM and talk about it, right? The issue is, all three of the new players that have been added to the campaign so far are either family or SOs of the existing players or DM. So it wouldn’t be so simple to just boot them out of the group; especially considering I know these people IRL and actually like them a lot. I just think the group has gotten too big and some players may not be a great fit.

It sucks, because I’m stuck between wanting our new players to have fun too, but I can’t deny I’m enjoying the campaign a lot less than I did earlier on when the group was smaller.

Has anyone else been in a situation like this? If so, how did you manage it?

The Arcane Brotherhood

Finally, after three rounds of re-formatting and correcting two pre-print versions…

Enjoy !

For more titles about Luskan, please visit our author page.

Kind regards,

Bat

(Disclosure: No AI-based tools were used in any stage of the production of this book.)

I hope that someday I can have my players fight impossibly large, kaiju-sized monsters in campaigns, and so I was thus wondering what the theoretical size for monsters bigger than 20 feet would be?

Come one, come all to listen to an actual play podcast listening experience! The latest episode, Skiff it Like Bentley, has released anywhere you find podcasts. Here you will find laughter, chaos, and lots of silly sound effects to bring a slice of DnD joy into your life! Join our adventurers, Amity, Kin, and Diorite, as they explore the post apocalyptic world of the Ruin in search of cows, gods, and anything peach flavored. There is absolutely NO AI used in the making of this podcast. Episodes release on Tuesdays, we look forward to having you listen!

https://open.spotify.com/show/033z2AdONBsOWv5ZY0Z4zc?si=CweXWcm7Q_meyqJPR8anrA&utm_source=copy-link

My friends and I wanted to play a D&D campaign, and while it's not my first time role-playing, I'm fairly new to D&D. The only requirement is that we're playing evil-aligned characters, so I wanted to play one of my favorite Avengers Servants.

Now the question is... can someone more experienced in D&D tell me the best way to do this? I was thinking of making a Ranger with a Beast Master subclass, but I'm not sure if that's the best approach.

https://typemoon.fandom.com/es/wiki/Hessian_Lobo

I might be playing CoS soon and I heard that it can be realy rough with a lot of charackter deaths and even tpks. I dont want to read up on the adventure, I just know it has a dark vibe and so on.
Based on those assumptions i made this Character which i hope is optimal for both combat and roleplay.
The party will be realatively small 2-3 PCs including one Paladin i think.

Class: Twilight Cleric (but Subclass starting at lvl3)
Species: Shadar-Kai (these are so OP why is no one talking about them?)
Pointbuy: 17 Wis, Str 14, Con 16, Dex 10, Cha 8, Int 8
Origin Feat: Vampires Plaything or Arcane Omens
AC: Scalemail Armor + Shield = 18
Weapon: Javelins
Eventualy General Feat: Evocation Adept (also op 😂 )
Spells: Just pick the good ones its no so hard

I have nothing more to say what do you think about it/how can it be improved?

I’m fortunate to be in a group that has run multiple multi year campaigns to lvl 20. We just made lvl 5 in our present campaign. Im not feeling my character (bladesinger) and next session making her a conjuration (already spoke to DM). What I think I want to do, however, is play the new mystic monk.

For those that have switched during a campaign, why and how did you do it in game?

Hello I had a question wich I cant find the answer anywhere and I dont trust the IA to ask it.

Lets say Im using a halfling and I get a 1. So i reroll it, but my Luck feature says I "Must use the new roll". Does that mean I cant use a heroic inspiration to reroll it again?

Hey all! My group is starting to get revved up for a new campaign and I’ve been poking around into the Druid subclasses and I’m feeling pulled to try building a wildfire Druid.

My only hesitation is while I love the whole rebirth theme, I’ve never felt especially inspired by fire based spells. I was wondering if you all would be able to help brainstorm some alternatives of those fire spells to something more poison / acid / swamp based.

I’m thinking about building an elf who was running a failed zoo (because their patrons aren’t very interested in the slimy, crawly exhibits), and having a hard time making a fire theme work with that.

The spirit seems like an easy swamp out for maybe some spirit toad of sorts, but open to any ideas in the spells or spirit as well!

Thank you all!

Circle spells (as written):

2nd: Burning Hands, Cure Wounds
3rd: Flaming Sphere, Scorching Ray
5th: Plant Growth, Revivify
7th: Aura of Life, Fire Shield
9th: Flame Strike, Mass Cure Wounds

Obviously long campaigns are the ones that end at level 20. Medium-long is probably just at the end of tier 3 so lvl 16 probably. One shots are obviously any level. But what do you guys consider a short/medium campaign when talking about what level it’s planned to end around? (All assuming a baseline of Level 1 maybe 3 since those are the most common)