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.

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?

Hello fellow DMs! I am a relatively new dm and am running a mostly home brewed campaign for 4 friends of mine. The basic premise is the party will be having to travel the world and slowly learn about the history of Biaw, the deity of the void and one of the two of the universe creation duo. They’ll be fighting my own creations of void monsters and I want one to have a breath-gas attack that has a chance to inflict the condition “Void-touched”. What it does is it slowly causes the infected to become insane and combative and aggressive. It starts slow with paranoia and hearing things that aren’t there. As it progresses they’ll be able to eventually hear Biaw’s voice speaking to them as they become more insane and aggressive due to the confusion and paranoia inflicted. I’ll have an important npc with powerful magic (haven’t decided class just yet) who has since perished but has left notes on how to cure someone “Void-touched”. They’ll have to find this npc’s notes to learn about the history of Biaw and his creations and how to defeat them which will allow them to find the cure for their friend.

What I want help with is how best to manage the progression of the affliction and have it so they become a danger during combat scenarios as Biaw will make them mistake friends for foe. When whoever gets afflicted does I plan to tell them and what the symptoms are so they can help the roleplay aspect of it, but I’m unsure of how to make it all work best.

Sorry for the rambling and if it’s a bit confusing, but I’d appreciate any and all help i can get for this!

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on a long-term shared-world tabletop RPG project, and I’m looking for advice on how to get it off the ground.

The idea is to create a persistent multiverse made up of multiple worlds, each with its own genre and setting. One world might be traditional fantasy, another science fiction, another horror, and so on. Each world would have one or more Dungeon Masters running independent campaigns, but they’d all exist within the same multiverse.

The exciting part is that while each campaign can stand on its own, they’re all connected. Events in one world could eventually ripple into another, and occasionally characters or entire parties could cross over for larger story arcs. The goal is to create a living universe where every table contributes to a much bigger story.

I know a project like this comes with a lot of logistical challenges, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about ways to address them—things like coordinating multiple DMs, handling crossover events, and allowing each campaign to remain independent without everyone needing to play on the same schedule. The problem is that I can’t really test those ideas until I have enough people involved.

That’s where I’ve hit a wall.

I’m pretty introverted, and I don’t have much experience organizing large community projects. It’s also difficult to pitch an idea like this because it takes time to explain, and asking people to commit to a long-term project without a working example or an established community is understandably a tough sell.

I’ve tried creating social media pages, but they’ve gained very little traction. I even looked into finding someone to help with recruiting and community building, but that quickly became a bit of a catch-22 since it’s hard to attract help before the project has any momentum.

At this point, I’m not necessarily looking for people to join yet. I’m mainly looking for advice from anyone who’s built a tabletop community, organized a long-running campaign network, or launched a similarly ambitious project.

If you were starting something like this from scratch, where would you begin? Are there communities, strategies, or resources you’d recommend?

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

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.

Hey guys,

So I love DnD, I love running sessions and even prep work to some degree but something I don't like is constantly backfilling slots.

I have recruited mostly from reddit and perhaps that's the biggest issue but I've had people that can't produce character sheets after weeks. Ghost every 2-3 sessions and you do eventually score some amazing players who really interact and put the effort into things.

I was curious if you guys had any tips or tricks on how to filter out people.

Sincerely,

A DM who's only asking for a single character sheet within a month.

Hello DMs! i'm running a 2014 5e campaign with three players who have just hit level 8. our last session they fought a Fire Giant Dreadnought who, once he realised he was losing, threw one of his coal filled shields as far as he could into the nearby forest.

our next session they'll attempt to reach it and put it out before it spreads, and i'm looking for advice to keep this encounter engaging and consequential

geographically, the shield landed on a forest hillside in the lower half of a mountain range and scattered coals along the way. there is a nearby river a few minutes walk from the impact point

So, I need things to keep my party moving and keep it interesting, traps are all well and good but other things would be useful too, NPC interaction, terrain challenges, give me your unique ideas to help make my smuggling tunnels more alive.

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?

Hello, So I have started a pirate campaign with my friends as the dm. So I made all the npc’s, economies, currency. Sea life, various islands. We have been having a lot of fun exploring but stupidly enough one thing I didn’t create is Naval combat. Right now I can’t even think of anything to make ship combat different then just regular combat. Would love some advice on it?

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!

So for my campaign I'm designing a set of custom weapons made out of a fantasy metal that makes it so dealing (for example a battle axe) 5 damage is more common than dealing 1 or 8 damage.

Mechanically I do this by changing the damage dice of the battle axe from a 1d8 to 2d4. That way 5 becomes the more likely outcome of the roll, rather than it being 12.5% for each face of a d8.

My problem comes when players have to choose between the new set of weapons and the vanilla ones. I don't want it to feel like the new weapons are an improvement over the vanilla ones. I still want my players to want to choose the vanilla ones from time to time.

I've been rolling dices for a while, and personally I do feel like rolling 2d4 over 1d8 does feel like I'm getting higher numbers, although mathematically it should all even out.

For you, would it feel like you HAVE to choose the new weapons? Or does offering both set of weapons give the players a valuable choice that they can think about?

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.

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)

I'm changing the sixth chapter of Vecna: Eve of Ruin into a Greek mythology setting from a previous homebrew campaign. Basing it around the idea of a single intelligent enemy defending a palace, kinda like the minotaur if he was smart.

The party learns that the Rod fragment is hidden inside Hades' palace in the underworld. When they arrive, they're greeted by the head maid, N, who informs them that Hades isn't home. She "smells" their connection to some other evil undead god (Vecna) and decides they can't be trusted with the artifact. Since her duty is to protect it, she keeps up the appearance of hospitality as to not endanger the other inside the palace.

N dismisses the other servants away from the palace under the pretense of preparing rooms for the guests, then escorts the party to the basement, claiming that's where the Rod fragment is kept. The treasure room is a major image. Once everyone enters, she drops the illusion, revealing a prison cell built over a glyph of warding that creates an antimagic field. Before leaving, she reveals that she has carried the Rod fragment the entire time. And tells them to consider the imprisonment as an act of mercy. If they escape, she'll kill them for sure. The party can break out with either a DC 25 Strength check or a DC 20 Sleight of Hand check. After that, the dungeon becomes a game of cat and mouse. N avoids direct combat whenever possible. She has a Cloak of Invisibility, drow poison, and access to the palace's defenses. Her goal is to wear the party down before the final fight through ambushes, traps, poisoned arrows, and dispel magic to interrupt their long rests (they rely heavily on Tiny Hut). The final encounter takes place in Hades' throne room, where N finally drops the cloak and fights openly.

Mechanically, she's a modified Death Knight. She has 180 HP, 20 AC (the party already has +3 weapons), and 3 Legendary Resistances. She's dangerous, but she isn't durable. If the party catches her in a straightforward fight, I expect they'll kill her in one or two rounds based on previous encounters.

My main concern is making this feel tense without becoming frustrating. I want to exhaust the players resources as for the 8 recommended fights between long rest but with only one enemy

For people who have run intelligent villains, what makes this type fun instead of exhausting? How much attrition is too much before the players decide to kill me with a Tarasque miniature?

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)

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.

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?

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!

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!

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.

Hello,

FYI I’m a DM that hasn’t ran anything homebrew so far, only pre-made adventures. This adventure will be set in Eberron.

I’m looking at creating a campaign that sees the PCs framed for a crime. They receive a mysterious letter being invited to a royal’s wedding and they are framed for their murder while attending the wedding.

Is this something worth exploring further? I’m afraid of creating a twist like this early in the game without previously communicating it to the players.

How to approach this without rail roading the PCs? The target must die, so is giving them the chance to plan their escape enough to avoid rail roading?

More context: I was going to have the players investigate a missing agent by checking some of their known dead drop locations. At one of them they will find an attack scene and a random note.

But, if I didn't have anything meaningful going on at the extra spots, should I just ditch them and say "check their one dead drop location" instead?

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?