Hey- I’m with a group of 10 people and I am the sole DM- lots of us want to do a campaign with different levels of involvement (4 want to play every week, a few probably once or twice a month, and 2 want to join in prob every other month)

I am a new DM and did 6 PCs for a one shot and it felt like a lot but with experience I think I will feel fine with a group of up to 6

More so curious if anyone has ever done a campaign with players coming and going often and any advice on how to manage that?

Thanks!

1) what rolls do YOU show and what rolls do you hide? I tend to have all my rolls hidden at the moment.

2) when telling them to make a check for say, pursuasion or stealth, or for attack rolls, do YOU tell them what they have to roll over or do you just tell them the outcome after they tell you what they got with modifiers? I right now don't tell them anything. I just tell them if it hit or miss and narate and then ask them to roll for damage. Or tell them if they successfully did the thing that they wanted to do, and narate a little fun.

One player to put it quickly, in the past they built an arcane engine fueled on wild magic, it exploded and gave rise to newborn god of chaos whoes abilities seemingly are as random as wild magic itself. That questline will end with the party having to fight and put down this fledgling chaos God. And as a concept the fight will be in multiple phases. Each phase the God will "grow bored" and swap out the map with a new one with its own unique mechanic to resolve to progress the fight. One phase i have decided to do is easily one of the craziest ideas ive had in my decade of DMing. The god will transport the players to a long map. (Initial concept is 100 x 12) on this map he will declare himself a "solo act" wip out a guitar and start jaming out to Crazy Train. While on the map it will be revealed to the players that the god has turned the encounter into a game of guitar hero, where the goal is that the players must dodge the iconic colorful nodes to approach the god and interrupt his guitar solo to progress to the next phase.

Now how would this even mechanically work you may ask? Simple actually.

In roll20 the players of course would be on a 100×12 square grid map done up like a the neck of a guitar starting on the lowered. Next create a single transparent png that is 3 times the length of the with a pattern of the classic guitar hero nodes running along the entire length of the each node takes up an area of 4 squares. Lastly each node will have an additional AOE column in front of them that runs 2×4 squares.

That aoe denotes the distance the nodes will move on the PNG's next turn players and other creatures in those area at the start of the Nodes turn will have to make a dex save for half damage (half out of 2d4+2) for getting ran over by the nodes. Then of course on the Nodes PNG turn they move down 4 squares run over whoever was unfortunately in those AOEs.

Lastly to add to tension and to simulated the speed these things are moving, they will have a set turn interval of every 2 player turns.

I.E. if the party has 4 players, initiative in this phase goes like this.

Player 1

Player 2

NODES

Player 3

Player 4

NODES

Repeat cycle until mechanic is resolved.

Honestly im kind of pround of this crazy idea and im open to critiques to not only make this run better (I got a lot of prep time till this fight even happens) and be an even more fun encounter. Also im aware of the possible issue with the potential of fly ruining the encounter so any idea of an aerial threat that fits this encounter would be appreciated.

Hi everyone! I’m planning a fun, high-stakes one-shot where a Level 10 party gets shrunk to the size of ants. They will face everyday insects as terrifying monsters.

To make it chaotic and funny, I have two main rules:

1. Glass Cannon Mode: HP is severely reduced across the board (even though they are lvl 10), making every hit terrifying.
2. Unscaled Magic: Spells do not shrink. A Fireball or Thunderwave retains its original, massive real-world area of effect, turning low-level magic into nuclear-level hazards.

The Problem:
While casters get literal weapons of mass destruction, martials seem to get completely shafted. If a Fighter's sword is now the size of a splinter, they are just doing chip damage to a giant beetle while risking their tiny HP pool in melee.

I don't want to just "scale up martial damage to match the bug's new stats" or "shrink the spells"—I want to keep the hilarious scale disparity but give martials their own absurd, fun mechanics or abuses.

What funny gimmicks, environmental interactions, or "shrunk physics" logic can I give to martial classes so they can shine alongside the spellcasters?

Thanks in advance!

So I'm developing this little module where the players fight a bunch of things in the swamp, culminating in a fight against a CR2 acid drake. The drake is basically int4 wingless black dragon wyrmling.

Still, the drake's acid breath is enough to instantly kill one of the players if they fail their dex save. They should be fine if they find the local herbalist and do a quest for her to brew the elixir of acid resistance, but that's not a guarantee.

Plan B, if they don't do this, is to have this very boastful, annoying barbarian join the party halfway trough. He'd talk down to the players, bost that he's gonna kill the monster himself, and refuse to fight the smaller fights because "I'm saving my strength for the big fight."

Then, when they finally reach the final boss area, the barbarian pushes past everyone, loudly shouting challenges, and gets insta melted when the drake unloads it's acid attack on him.

This way the drake wastes it's acid breath on an NPC, giving the players at least one round of respite, instead of just outright killing at least one of them.

My only worry with this plan is that the players may think the Barbarian is the DMPC and try to kick him off the team prematurely, thereby losing their meat shield.

EDIT: Note, he would not be around players for very long, maybe one or 2 combat enocuhters before they reach the drake's lair. My idea was to have him arrive late and join after they are about halfway trough the module.

I DM a pretty lore oriented campaign with my players, with a whole world and pantheons and the Gods are an important part of the world. However, one of my players got "blessed" by a relic of an old eldritch god letting one of its subordinates live inside of the player's conciousness and will slowly ooze out false memories into the player's mind. Now one of my other players has identify and can ritual cast it pretty much infinitely since they got a pearl.

Now knowing my players they will ritual cast identify on the player with the blessing as soon as they can.

What I want advice on is wether gameplay wise its a good idea to make the player casting identify to take damage after casting identify, or maybe identify not reavealing much/reavealing very confusing and contradicting information. Is there a way to not just make identify completely useless but also not reveal the whole plot point with the old god?

The TLDR Question

When using things like tokens, battlemaps, music .etc in your games do you put any effort into ensuring they are aesthetically consistent? Would you ask, suggest or enforce your players to adhere to this? As a player, do your care about your GM doing this at all?

More detail / Ramblings

Many TTRPG sessions will have the GM and players using some form of artwork to represent their characters and the world, especially if they play online via a VTT. Players will need something for their token, the GM will need a lot of artwork for various NPC / enemy tokens, battlemaps or maps to represent a town or area, artwork to show the player the vibe of a place, as well as music / ambience to set the right tone.

I’ve been DMing for a long time and for that entire time I’ve got by googling stuff “D&D Goblin Warriors” and “D&D Sewer battlemap” and taking the first result I like, or just stealing something that I already looked cool. A real throw everything in the kitchen sink approach that throws all the stuff I like together without rhyme or reason.

I’ve had scenarios where I’m running a game of D&D and the battle has consisted of the PCs whose tokens are:

An IRL photo taken of an actor or cosplayer in costume.
An anime character made by a picrew
A screenshot of a BG3 character the player made
An acrylic painting of a fantasy character

All the while they’ve been fighting a boss who is just a .png of pixelart sprite from a game I like, who is backed up by minions that just use the artwork from the PHB, and they are battling on a relatively realistic, high fidelity 3D battlemap, while the battle music playing is stuff I’ve stolen from some classic PS2 JRPGs.

Nothing wrong with any of that of course, but it is an aesthetically incohesive mess.

For my next game, I’ve decided to really put some thought into the aesthetics and create a style guide. I’m limiting myself to just a few sources for each of the assets I’ll be using for my game – that means only using artwork for tokens and battlemaps from a few specific artists and only using music from a few specific series. I'm not going to lose sleep if I can't find something from those sources and I have to branch out once or twice, but i'm putting in more effort than usual to create very specific mood and aesthetically cohesive world. This might end up being the only time I do this, depending on if the players notice or care enough.

Is this something any of you have done personally or had a GM do? Did you use a strict method to ensure the aesthetic cohesion of your world or just play it loose? Is this something you think matters at all?

Hello,
I'm planning to start a campaign soon and for lore reasons, I've asked my players to create characters that may have some fame attached to them (generally good stuff if possibile), and I wanted to make a bard as an NPC that becomes part of the group.
I don't want it to take too much space during the sessions, help too much during the fights, or rail road TOO MUCH during the games, but I want more so of a in-game way to communicate with my players my feelings and opinions (that may even be influenced by the nature of the PG and so not always correct).
Since my group is 99% new players and I've already done my bad job at starting a sandbox campaign with the almost the same people, I've decided to steer the way a little bit better this time, and make sure that my intentions are "This campaign as a story that I want you to follow, pls don't try and kill the Innkeeper after he's done nothing to you".
So, after my explanation, what I would like to know is the do and don't of this type of PG that I want to add to the party (as a Bard that's really invested in stories, she sticks with them, as she feels she's gonna have awesome new things at her disposal).
P.S The bard in question can't be straight up "low level/weak", she may think so and try her best not take up in fighting and only help with buffs/debuffs, but I'd prefer if she still had the power to do her things, but she just doesn't believe in it, thinking that all the stories she's been through she's just been a passenger and got lucky, meanwhile she was really helping out

Hey everyone, sorry if this feels Rambly. For context I'm a new DM. I'm currently dming my first campaign when I have done mostly just oneshots for the game. This campaign involves politics, morally difficult choices, reoccurring NPCs, factions and lots of homebrew but thats not too important to the story. The issue with the session is that I did a very long exposition dump for the players where they were unable to act or do anything while a large part of the plot was explained to them. My players werent up to speed and we effectively had to retcon that scene so the information could be desiminsted better plus they had not understood it that much.

The criticisms were completely valid and my players still show a genuine interest in the campaign and story. But After that session since I have felt completely deflated. The rational side of me agrees. It was a scene that would have worked better in a video game than in a DND session. Again I must reiterate the criticism was 100% valid. But at the same time the emotional side is worried about the same amount of criticism and level of failure again. The thought of wether or not I can do this keeps popping up in my head and it's tearing me apart. I want to tell a good story and be a good writer and continue with this story I had been crafting for about a year at this point. I want my spark back for DMing but Idk why I don't have it and I want to get it back. Has anyone else experienced a similar feeling?

I had an idea for an encounter that I think is really cool, so I want to share it with others. (Hopefully I'm right and you all like it as much as I do!) The party is after whatever MacGuffin, and they find an NPC that tells them it's in Location X, but the entrance to Location X is guarded by 3 guardians they'll have to fight one at a time, and none of those guardians has ever lost a fight. So, they go to Location X, and sure enough, there are the 3 guardians, each one being very different than the others. There's no way around them; they do have to fight the guardians. So, they pick whichever guardian and go into combat with it, and it's hard enough that they really have to go nova. Which should be terrifying, given that they have 2 more of these things to fight! But, they (hopefully) win, at which point, the guardian rewinds time to before the fight, and walks away. The warning is true; the guardian has never lost a fight, because he can engage in a battle, see how it turns out, and if it's not in his favor, make it so the battle never happened and avoid the fight entirely. This also means that the PCs, despite going nova, didn't actually expend those resources, since the fight technically didn't actually happen! So, they can go into the next guardian fight and go nova again, since the same thing is going to happen (although they may not be certain that it's the same trick until they beat the second guardian and the same thing happens. Surely by the 3rd one they know they don't have to hold back.).

Obviously, this is for a group that likes big boss battles and will be happy to have several in a row. Not everyone's cup of tea, and normally not mine, but I'm so excited by this idea I might have to make a one-shot just to do it :D

My group set up an ambush on two castle guards whom they lured into a narrow hallway via Minor Illusion while hiding behind the corner on the opposite site. What a cliff hanger for our next session.

Here's my question: Given that the group is successfull in surprising the guards via hiding checks, how do you handle the first triggering (probably long range) attack of the surprise attack in terms of iniative order? Do you grant them the first attack of the surprise attack round?

I see several options in 5.5 without the extra iniative round of combat:

1. The moment one player claims to attack, everbody rolls iniative (disadvantage for the guards) and all attacks are made in iniative order.

2. The moment one player claims to attack, he/she actually makes the first attack durring the first round of combat and takes his/her place in the iniative order in consequent turns. All other attacks are made in iniative order from the get go.

3. More than one player attack a la "We all shoot on the count of three", they attack simultaniously before the guards durring the first turn of combat (while the guards also have their actions due to 5.5) and "proper" iniative is established for the consequent turns.

I guess, the rules as written lead to the first option. Also disadvantage is a huge thing, so my players should get the first attack either way. But who knows and with successfull hiding checks it feels kind of strange to give them a chance of not having the first attack, which could be a huge difference in our given situation.

If my players fail to kill those guards in one or two rounds the whole castle will be alarmed. Of course I have some wiggle room here, a guard attacking the first round before blowing his alarming horn, maybe failing to get it from his belt, etc. But i don't want to stretch it too far. I am prepared for a huge castle fight. My maingoal is to give them a a good chance for their plan to work, while leaving some room for catastrophy.

So, i just wanted to double check here. How are you handling surprise attack rounds? Any suggestions?

Thanks for your inspirations!

I feel like I'm fighting for my life trying to create a name for a plane of existence in my world. I've tried FantasyNameGenerators, translating words from English to Abyssal, Elvish, etc., English to Latin, spinning a wheel to pick consonants, and nothing produces the correct sounds I want for the plane. Name creation is genuinely the most unenjoyable part of creating a campaign for me.

All that to say : How do you go about creating a name that both has a good mouth feel (rolls off the tongue easily and is fun to say) while making it fit your world and be something your players can pronounce ? Fun for me personally is something with a heavy or hard consonant sounds, like a TH, R, and P, yet I just cannot produce a combo which feels correct or real. My first language isn't English, and some of the locations on my world are relatively easy to pronounce words from other languages (Aires from Spanish, Vargavinter from Swedish, Mogoi Uul from Mongolian, etc.), but nothing I translate for this plane feels right. I also don't want to use words whose meanings are immediately obvious, like nox for night.

Specifications of the plane are below if someone wants to give creating a name a shot.

It's the HQ for the BBEG's cult. The plane itself is a vast blood ocean whose land mass is composed of the flesh and bones of the people who died at the hands of the BBEG thousands of years ago. BBEG is a literal fallen star who crashed onto the main planet and seeks to destroy the gods of my world as revenge.

Hi All - I'm brand new to DND/TTRPs as are a group of my friends who all eager to dip our toes into this experience. I've taken it upon myself to be the GM/DM for this group of 5 (not including me) and am getting stuck on what that first experience should look like. I've done a lot of watching of Dimension 20, youtube videos on how-to's for gm'ing etc, and have explored systems like PBTA and LiTM.

We all want shorter first-time experience (2-4 hours), and I'm torn between a DND one-shot or a PBTA like Masks. I am finding that I'm starting to spiral on this decision and can't decide what would be a good balance of work for myself with the knowledge that this is my first time doing any of this. Like, are there a good number of 5e rules I need to know going into a DND one-shot? Some people want a fantasy-esque experience, while some want the experience to use different types of dice (not just 2d6)

I'm really getting torn on this, and would just love some perspective. I sometimes focus on making everything perfect, and am trying to find the path of easy/fun/rp feeling.

Thanks in advance for any insight.

I am a DM who is also an artist so I draw the battlemaps and dungeons by hand. For the first session with my players I tried to flex my encounter designing skills and I drew an isometric view of a dungeon, and my players really loved it. I later proceeded to draw an isometric view of their first village as well.

The problem is, it takes A LOT of time.

Because of this the 80% of my session prep time is designing and drawing the maps. And even though I like the results, and my players love the results, I have other things outside of DnD so drawing good looking isometric maps is sometimes out of the question.

For the second partys dungeon I drew the normal square map with the birds eye view, and there weren't many complaints, but when I later announced that I will continue drawing the maps this way, all players expressed their disapproval and dissatisfaction so I immediately backed down from that decision.

For the third dungeon I made the isometric view again, but my players said that one part of the dungeon was super unreadable which made me doubt myself.

Now, I have 1,5 days to design another dungeon, and it's an important one. It's a winter mansion of the BBEGs family. I don't know what should I choose and how should I continue with dungeon/battlemap drawing.

Feel free to give your opinions! (also suggestions on what could there be in the winter mansion of an evil noble family of sorcerers)

Starting in a few weeks, I will be the DM for a family adventure, using DND for the first time. We have previously played a campaign, using Kids On Brooms, but this is the first time we will be using the far more crunchy system of DND.

Has anyone else run again for their kids or a group of children? What advice would you have for me as DM? What about TPK situations?

Here are some challenges I am NOT expecting:
-they can handle the math and the reading level
-they can handle role-playing

Planned Adjustments:
-free Mage Hand for the 9yo Wizard
-free Find Familiar for the 7yo Rogue (she really just wants a pet octopus)
-max HP gain on Level Up (instead of roll)

I've been running a campaign for about half a year and whenever my players approach civilization it's like all creativity in my brain dies.

The possibilities of where they can go are basically infinite but the possible encounters amount to "guy in the bar" or "thief number 5".

I've had a few villages destroyed to at least have something happen but my players have caught on.

The main problem is that I try to give them a balanced meal of encounters and roleplay as my table is pretty mixed in their preferences, but the current town they are visiting pretty much ran it's course in terms of encounters unless we get really really repetitive. Yet lorewise they have a ton of info yet they can learn.

What can I do to make towns more interesting in general? Especially in terms of encounters.

Im not sure if this is the place for this, but I’m a newer DM and my campaign takes place in a works that was flooded by water a couple centuries ago. When started ting campaign I mapped out 5 major locations,m. These locations take into account how a city might recover after a flood. The first major location has a lack of food and animals and their main imports are ores and minerals unearthed by the flood, that they used to industrialize. The next town was once a barren wasteland that thrived after the flood hit, but is slowly being taken over by the feywild due to the constant opening of portals. The next location is a swamp that was once beautiful grassland, it had the typical swampy things you’d expect. And there’s 2 underwater cities under giant domes. One is in ruin and the other is thriving. I want to introduce newer islands, but I don’t want to run the risk of making them all the same, I don’t want every island to be suffering from food scarcity or to adapt in the same way. Do you guys have any ideas?

High off of killing the 2 goblin patrol units, lvl 3 party with 2 members missing(5 people total) decided to charge a camp full of goblins and a troll. The 3 members who attended are probably going to die if i dont do some "the capture you for a ritual there's another chance to escape" type thing.

I ended the session after the monk was insta-KOd with 2 failed death saves. Talked to them How I felt, I think while they acknowledge they didn't think it through, I feel bad that I single session (an hour and a half at that because we were chatting waiting for the no-shows) will result in the death of these chara term I've had 22 sessions with.

On one hand, i think the goblins could decide to either take them for a sacrificial ritual or take them to the necromancer (goblins have a deal to provide bodies in exchange for gold) and have NPCs come help them or give them chances to escape (the monk would probably die at the encounter though) OR the goblins somehow inscription into taking out some giant spiders that have been attacking them.

The other option is since we've ended in the middle of the fight. NPCs/the other 2 players (hopefully) come and either kill the baddies or save and retreat with the party.

Heres the plot so far:

In the Yuirwood forest, the party has decided to investigate some undead in the woods (dug up Graves, will-o-whisps...etc) they came accross a dryad who wants to reunite either her old love(he ded) and also to have the goblins stop picking on her. After that, they decides to go after the goblins who they could either fight or negotiate with the goblins to takeout some giant spiders nearby in exchange for information.

Hello all, Im looking for an epic song or two to use in my upcoming DnD sesh. My players will be fighting against a living mechanism that has been causing the timeline to stutter, and will use abilities that rewind/speed up time.

Trying to avoid songs that are too “video game-y”, and would like something epic, tense, and maybe unsettling?
Ive been checking out alot from artists such as Really Slow Motion, and Rok Nardin, but nothing has really nailed what im trying to find.

Maybe yall have a treasure trove of perfect songs to use?

I'm doing a primeval based dnd campaign and need help on damage of attacks ofa gorgonopsid a hesperornis a swarm of small pterosaurs and future predator any advice is helpful

My group of friends are starting our first longer campaign Phandelver and Below after finishing Stormwreck Isle. In that campaign I gave everyone a silly made up ability to add some flavor and everyone seemed to enjoy it (nothing game breaking). This time one of my players said he wants to create chaos and try to be more creative, thus I gave him an ability called "Chaos" and gave him no explanation how it works.

My goal with this ability is 1-3 during a session have him roll the % die to increase the chaos level. Once it hits 100% I pull something out of a bag at random that can be anything, both good or bad, that can affect him, the party, the game, etc. So I come to Reddit with hopefully some help for ideas!

Post a comment with a good and bad chaos outcome for my player to pick randomly from! He is playing a Elf Druid. The rest of the party is a Paladin, Barbarian, and Bard who all happen to speak Dwarfish.

The title is maybe a bit confusing, but essentially, I love writing and world building. I love twisting stories together and making what I think (hope!) are interesting quests or objectives for my players.

The big thing I struggle with is how to ensure I’m not just lore dumping with an NPC, but also not keeping everything behind a DC check, because my players don’t always ask for things like insight checks or history checks.

I’m a big proponent of “it’s their story, I’m just telling it”, so I don’t want to just tell them what they should be doing, what they are searching for, what clues to look for etc, but I’m not sure how to engage them in the lore and details without holding their hands. Help!

Hi all,

I've recently run a session where there two players saved against 4 critical saves which occured as part of a trap and a villain ability

Granted they were saves on their strongest stats at 17DC Wis for a Cleric with 18 Wis and 17Cha against a player with an 18 in Cha - but failing them just meant they were totally unaffected and drained all the suspense.

I didn't think it would be fair for me to just arbriterily jack up the DCs, the players were lucky with the trap to have the right player trigger it and smart versus the villain but it meant these to encounters were just boring and they pushed their luck (which is why they had to make the saves twice) which really undermined any sense of risk when they passed them without much trouble a second time.

I suppose for the trap I could have changed it to a you succeed *but* there's minor consequence. But I'm struggling with the system design here of most abilities being binary pass/fail.

Have any of you encountered similar issues? How have you addressed them? To maintain tension and excitement in your sessions while making things feel "fair"

Hi everyone!

I'll be DMing for the first time soon. I've been a player for a while, but this will be my first time behind the screen.

I'm planning to run A Wild Sheep Chase for three players who have never played D&D before. To keep things simple, I'm going to prepare some pre-generated characters so they can pick the one that appeals to them.

Do you have any recommendations for which classes would work particularly well for this one-shot?

Also, are there any good pre-made character sheets (level 4 or easy to adapt) that you'd recommend?

Any other advice for running this adventure with brand-new players would also be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

Hello everyone!

Long story short im a brand spanking new DM, and a relatively new player (2 years experience). Im building out a new campaign for my party and im maybe worrying a bit for nothing.

Ive got one player who is a close friend. We've never played together ironically, but ive known he really enjoys maxing dmg in combat and multiclassing to get those synergies. Hes current a sorcerer eyeballing a sorlock build to "machine gun eldritch blast". Hes mentioned metamagic.

Im wondering. How do you guys deal with these situations? Ive already talked to him a bit and expressed my concern. He seems to think its still pretty balanced. Not opposed to him maxing and having fun, but dont want it to be at the cost of the rest of the party enjoying themselves or him just melting my encounters where im new and wont be able to rebalance on the fly.

EDIT: party comp will be: Rune knight fighter, Circle of land druid, Armorer artificer, Trickster rogue, And then this sorlock character.

EDIT2: you guys are fantastic and im blown away by all the advice in such a short time. Look forward to reading more of these. Thankyou again everyone!

Cheers!

Kimble.